Arch Linux | Reflector

[Madchatthew]

One of the things that I have found that can be annoying with Arch is that if you aren’t updating the OS on a regular basis, you will run into not being able to due the updates because the mirrorlist will be out of date. The easiest way to circumvent this is to update Arch using sudo pacman -Syu weekly/bi-weekly.

Another option is to install Reflector and enable and start the service so it can run on boot it is hooked into pacman when you run it. I am not sure if this would be a problem if you are using Arch as a daily driver and updating through the Software Center.

This installs Reflector

sudo pacman -S reflector

This starts Reflector service

sudo systemctl start reflector

This allows Reflector service to start at boot

sudo systemctl enable reflector

This allows you to check on the status of Reflector

sudo systemctl status reflector

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Reflector

[Madchatthew]

I would like to add that if you type reflector --help in the console you can see the different options you can add to the configuration file. I changed the sort to rate, so the fastest mirrors get used first. I also changed my country to US, because that is where I live and everything else I left default. While doing some research, the Reflector service should fire up about once a week or at boot. It is hooked into pacman so it may refresh when you run the update command above.

Location of the config file: /etc/xdg/reflector/reflector.conf