pacrank – pick the fastest Arch Linux mirrors

pacrank is a command-line utility for Arch Linux and Arch-based systems that selects fast package mirrors for the user’s location and writes the chosen servers to pacman’s mirrorlist.

It follows a focused ranking pipeline rather than offering a large collection of scoring controls. When countries are not supplied manually, pacrank estimates nearby countries by sampling the global Arch mirror list. It filters candidates by country and freshness, evaluates latency, and then subjects the strongest candidates to real download testing. Final ranking is based on observed throughput rather than latency alone. The throughput tests run sequentially so simultaneous transfers do not compete for the user’s available bandwidth and distort the results.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Automatically detects nearby countries by probing the global Arch Linux mirror list.
• Accepts one or more explicit ISO country codes when manual selection is preferred.
• Filters official mirrors by country and freshness.
• Keeps a configurable number of low-latency candidates after the initial testing stage.
• Measures actual download throughput using repository package data.
• Tests throughput one mirror at a time to avoid local bandwidth contention skewing measurements.
• Offers a dry-run mode which performs the ranking process without modifying the mirrorlist or country cache.
• Caches detected countries and can bypass that cache when fresh detection is required.
• Separates privileged file operations from network activity, dropping privileges before opening network connections.
• Atomically replaces /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist while preserving the original file mode.
• Lets users control how many candidates survive the latency and download stages.
• Supports diagnostic logging through RUST_LOG.
• Provides shell completions for Bash, Zsh and fish.

Website: github.com/mexus/pacrank
Support:
Developer: mexus
License: Apache License 2.0 or MIT License

pacrank is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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