geodebtest

Benchmark tool for Debian mirrors in your own country. Autodetects your location, fetches the official mirror list and finds the fastest mirrors near you.

Features

• Autodetects your country from your public IP (override with --country)
• Fetches the current official mirror list from Debian (no hardcoded mirrors)
• Verifies architecture support against each mirror instead of trusting the mirror list metadata (which is often stale)
• Includes the official country alias ftp.<cc>.debian.org even when the mirror list omits it
• Measures ping, TTFB and download speed
• Ranks mirrors from best to worst
• Always includes the global CDN (deb.debian.org) as baseline
• Shows best overall and best local mirror, as sources.list lines
• Can apply the mirror you pick straight to your APT sources (see below)
• Warns when any APT source still references another Debian release than the running system (easy to miss after a release upgrade)

Usage

chmod +x geodebtest.sh
./geodebtest.sh

Optional:

./geodebtest.sh --country DE
./geodebtest.sh --suite bookworm --runs 5
./geodebtest.sh --max-mirrors 20

Example output

RANK SCORE HOST                           PING      TTFB      SPEED
1    780   deb.debian.org                 1.0 ms    0.016 s   84.76 MiB/s

Recommendation:
Best overall:
  deb.debian.org
  deb https://deb.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

Applying a mirror

When run as root on a Debian system, the script offers to update your APT sources after the benchmark: enter the RANK number of the mirror you want, or press Enter to skip. Use --no-apply to disable the prompt entirely (the prompt is also skipped automatically when there is no terminal, e.g. in cron).

What it does:

• Updates /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources (whichever exist), replacing only Debian archive mirrors - security.debian.org and third-party repos (Docker etc.) are never touched
• Takes a timestamped backup of each file first, stored in a backups/ folder next to the script (the 5 newest per file are kept)
• Validates the mirror and runs apt-get update; if it fails, the previous sources are restored automatically

Notes

• Country detection uses Cloudflare's trace endpoint (cloudflare.com and 1.1.1.1), with ipapi.co and ipinfo.io as fallbacks - the dedicated geo-IP services are often on DNS blocklists (Pi-hole etc.). Only your public IP is sent, nothing else.
• Mirror data comes from the official Mirrors.masterlist.
• Countries with many mirrors are capped at 10 by default; raise with --max-mirrors.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.