How To Install htop on Linux
If you’re a Linux guru, you’ve probably already heard of ‘top’, which is a simple process monitoring program which runs in command line. However, if you find top a bit boring and like the idea of a more colorful and interesting UI, ‘htop’ might be for you. Here’s a screenshot of htop in action:
Advantages of using htop include:
- Colour meters show you at a glance if CPU load, memory usage etc. is within acceptable levels
- Supports user interaction using the mouse as well as keyboard
- Sort process list by CPU%, MEM%, time running etc., and in ascending or descending order
- Fully customizable according to your needs
- Help menu which lists all possible commands (useful for beginners)
Installation:
Before we can actually install htop, we firstly need to install Repoforge (previously RPMForge), which will act as a repository from which we can get the files.
RHEL, CentOS & Fedora (32-bit):
RHEL 5, CentOS 5 & Fedora
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -Uhv rpmforge-release*.rf.i386.rpm
RHEL 6 & CentOS 6
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.i686.rpm
rpm -ihv rpmforge-release*.rf.i686.rpm
RHEL, CentOS & Fedora (64-bit):
RHEL 5, CentOS 5 & Fedora
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uhv rpmforge-release*.rf.x86_64.rpm
RHEL 6 & CentOS 6
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ihv rpmforge-release*.rf.x86_64.rpm
Once you have installed Repoforge/RPMForge, you can then install htop by simply issuing the following command:
yum install htop
You can then run htop by simply executing:
htop
Debian:
The installation process for Debian is even simpler, as it is already available in the repositories.
- Open up an SSH session.
- Log in with your root user log in credentials.
- Type “apt-get install htop”.
- To run htop, type “htop”.
- If you wish to quit htop at any point, press F10.
Notes for WHM/cPanel users:
We don’t recommend enabling additional repositories on servers with WHM/cPanel, as this can cause problems.
Instead, you can use wget to get the RPM from http://pkgs.repoforge.org/htop/, then use the rpm -i command.
More information on htop can be found here.
Was this article helpful?