Download from the fastest mirrors on Arch Linux with Reflector

When downloading packages from the repositories of our distribution GNU / Linux, it is important to configure the fastest mirrors so that the download takes place in the shortest possible time. Usually it is recommended to select the mirrors closest to our location for this purpose, although in practice this is not always the most appropriate, since the response speed of the same server where the mirror is hosted has more influence.

In the case of Arch Linux, on the page of mirror status The developers have posted a table with all known mirrors and it is automatically updated showing their status and response speed. If we wanted, we could take those that we like from there and enter them manually in our mirrorlist, although to help us make this task easier there is Reflector.

Reflector is a script that is in charge of consulting the data provided by Mirror Status and allows us to work with them in different ways using commands in the console. Now we are going to see how to use it to automatically configure the fastest mirrors before each update.

Instructions

Let's start by installing the package Reflector from the repositories:

# pacman -S reflector

To see all the available options we can take a look at its help manual:

$ reflector --help

A basic use would be this:

# reflector --sort rate -l 5 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Explanation:

• –Sort: Tells Reflector what parameter you should use to sort the mirrors. The available options are rates (download speed), score (score in Mirror Status), country (country of location), age (age of last sync) and delay (delay time). In this case we are telling you to order them according to your best download speed.
• -l: Limits the number of results to the number of mirrors that we indicate, taking into account the date of the last synchronization. Here we tell you to provide us with the 5 most recent mirrors.
• –Save: Sets the file where it will print those 5 fastest and most recent mirrors it found. The file where we need them is obviously our mirrorlist. It is very important to make a backup of the original mirrorlist first.. During the installation, Arch Linux creates one automatically in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.original, but it doesn't hurt to make sure it's there or create one if it doesn't exist.

In this way, to download from the best mirrors it would be enough to make a backup of our original mirrorlist and then call Reflector with the command already mentioned. However, it is obviously a very long command that is probably difficult to remember or lazy to write. A good alternative would then be create an alias to invoke it with a simpler command.

In a common installation with Bash We just have to open the ~ / .bashrc file with a text editor and put a line at the end like this:

alias nombre_del_alias='comandos a ejecutar'

Apply the changes:

$ . .bashrc

And with that we can now execute the orders we want with a custom command. For example, for Reflector i use this:

alias update='sudo reflector --sort rate -l 5 --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist && yaourt -Syyu --aur --devel'

Thanks to that alias, when I want to update the system all I have to do is write Update in the terminal, which makes Reflector print the 5 fastest and most recently synced mirrors to the mirrorlist, and then run Yogurt to carry out a complete update of both the packages of the official repositories and those of AUR and devel.

Now it is up to each person to customize the alias according to their needs. Maybe they want to use the same one as me or prefer to create one just for Reflector, or replace Yogurt by Packer or simply Pacman. The possibilities are endless.

In closing, it should be noted that using Reflector Before each update, it will initially take a little longer than normal to query Mirror Status, although it will be compensated by the higher speed it will provide when downloading the packages.