how to 🪄

Build and Install htop 3 on Ubuntu.

Htop is a command-line utility that allows you to interactively monitor your running system’s vital resources processes in real-time which are currently managed by the Linux Kernel. It's a little bit like its counterpart 'top' but on steroids.

Kenzo Kylo, yannick Coffi

May 9, 2022 • 2 min read

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This post is part of our ongoing series on our Linux monitoring system. As mentioned earlier, htop has become increasingly popular among Linux users, due to its modern features and ease of use. Its version 3.2.0 came out a couple of days ago but lots of distributions are still on 2.x and probably will take time before it hits on your distro.

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htop has numerous user-friendly features as such:

htop is significantly faster than top.
It displays a process tree and comes with mouse support.
It has a nicer text-graphics interface, with colored output.
It is highly customizable.
It also displays a process tree and comes with mouse support.
Users can perform certain functions related to processes (killing, renicing, etc) which can be done without entering their PIDs.

Let's check what our distribution has to offer.

$ sudo apt info htop

OUTPUT

Package: htop
Version: 2.2.0-2build1
Priority: optional
Section: utils
Origin: Ubuntu

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As you can see, they are still way behind; on version 2.2.0.

Install dependency

We’ll need the following dependencies in other to build htop.

$ sudo apt install gcc make wget tar libncursesw5 libcunit1-ncurses libncursesw5-dev python automake

Download `htop`

Download the latest version of htop from its official github.

$ wget https://github.com/htop-dev/htop/archive/3.2.0.tar.gz

Extract the source code.

$ tar zxvf 3.0.1.tar.gz

OUTPUT 
of these script created folder

htop-3.2.0

Building `htop`

1. Generate Configure Script

$ cd htop-3.2.0

bash autogen.sh

2. Configure

$ ./configure

3. Install htop

$ sudo make install


##Check version

$ htop --version

htop 3.2.0

htop will be installed on /usr/local/bin/htop to avoid any conflict with htop installed by Debian's Advanced Package Tool (or APT), which is located on /usr/bin/htop.

Run htop

Type htop and press Enter. A screen will open up and will look like the screenshot below.

The htop footer contains its menu command. These commands can be used to do various functions for instance F2 to Setup Columns or F6 to Sort By can be used to sort the process via CPU usage and memory usage.
You can even display processes for the specific user with htop -u username
Pressing q will simply exit the command mode.

That’s it! _ we hope this article was helpful.
If you need more help you can always refer to the utility' manual or help command as such: man htop and htop -h.

Install dependency

Download htop

Building htop

Run htop

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Download `htop`

Building `htop`