20 April 2026

Nala is faster than apt

Nala keeps most of the familiar apt command set, and offers some nice extras.

When you install Nala, the first thing to do is run the nala fetch command, which will present a list of mirrors sorted by how fast they are. You can select multiple mirrors, picking several fast mirrors will allow Nala to download packages at blazing speeds.

When you update, install or upgrade, nala will fetch from multiple mirrors at once, and make up to 3 concurrent connections with each mirror. I estimate that this can be 10 times as fast as apt on the download part of installs, on the install side it still has to install one package at a time due to limitations in the dpkg backend. It caps connections per mirror to prevent overloading them.

Beyond blazing fast updates Nala offers a history command, and improved visual progress over apt during installations.

Nala needs to run the fetch command to initialize its’ mirror list, if you deploy in multiple environments (cloudhosts, data centers, closets) with configuration management you’ll need to provision its mirror list, which lives in /etc/apt/sources.list.d, on current releases this file is fetch.sources, on older releases it might be nala-sources.list.

When working with a Configuration As Code tool like Ansible, you’ll need to batch installs to take advantage of Nala’s fast downloads, but doing so means one failed package can stop a larger job. Ansible’s apt module may be a lot slower, but you can choose to continue if a package fails.

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Racoon and Debian 13 Trixie are shipping with the current release, but it’s available at least as a back port in Bookworm, Jammy and Noble. If you’re using a derivative that has additional repositories like LinuxMint, Nala doesn’t support their mirrors, but will still update from the primary repo in your regular sources.

For documentation and alternate install see: Nala’s Github Page.