Apt-Fast speeds up APT downloads of Ubuntu packages

Ubuntu users can install, update, upgrade and remove packages using the manager APT packages based on Debian. This package manager delivers the packages with all their dependencies from the repositories and installs them on our operating system, as long as it is based on Debian, as is the case with Ubuntu or Linux Mint. But don't you think that sometimes the downloads are slow? If you think so, we can speed them up with a utility called Apt-Fast.

Apt-Fast greatly increases the download speed of APT packages downloading them in parallel and with several connections for each of the packages. The tool is very useful for installation by means of the command apt o apt-get be much faster, especially when the software we want to install requires several packages. In this post we will show you how to speed up the process of downloading software from repositories using Apt-Fast.

How to use Apt-Fast

First of all, we will have to install the software. We can do it using the following command:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -sL https://git.io/vokNn)"

We will also have to install aria 2, which we will achieve with the following command:

sudo apt-get install aria2

Another way to do it is by adding your repository and installing the software (recommended) with these commands:

• For Ubuntu 14.04 and later: sudo add-apt-repository ppa: saiarcot895 / myppa
• For Ubuntu 13.10 and earlier: sudo add-apt-repository ppa: apt-fast / stable

Once the repository is added, we will write the commands:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install apt-fast

Some distributions have Apt-Fast in their repositories by default, so it's worth using the last command first to make sure.

How to configure Apt-Fast

After installing the tool, we will add some servers to the apt-fast.conf file. To do this, we will edit the file, for which we will use the command:

sudo nano /etc/apt-fast.conf

For Ubuntu based operating systems, we will add:

MIRRORS = ('http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu, http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu, http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/ubuntu, http: // ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/ubuntu, http://mirror.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/pub/linux/distributions/ubuntu/ ')

How to use Apt-Fast

To use Apt-Fast it is enough that we do it as we would do it with the APT commands. For example, to install the Apache web server, we would write:

sudo apt-fast update
sudo apt-fast install apache 2

Has it worked for you? Has the download speed of your APT installations improved a lot?