In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Htop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Htop or Hisham’s top is an interactive and real-time system-monitor process viewer written for Linux. It is designed to replace the Unix program top. It shows a frequently updated list of the processes running on a computer, normally ordered by the amount of CPU usage. Unlike top, htop provides a full list of processes running, instead of the top resource-consuming processes. Htop uses color and gives visual information about the processor, swap, and memory status. It is a must-have when you want to monitor the resources of your Linux server over an ssh connection for example.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation Htop monitoring tool on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Htop on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Installing Htop.
Install htop process monitoring tool using apt-get command:
sudo apt-get install htop
Now that htop is installed on your server you’ll want to start the program by running the following in a command prompt:
htop
This will open the program and you’ll see something similar to the following:
Congratulations! You have successfully installed htop. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing htop process monitoring tool on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official htop website.
