How to install htop on CentOS or RHEL

Last updated on November 5, 2020 by Dan Nanni

htop vs. top

htop is an ncurses-based real-time process viewer for Linux. While its interface is inspired by venerable top command, htop has several user-friendly features, not available in top. For example, htop allows you scroll a process list horizontally or vertically to see full command lines. Also, with htop, you can kill or re-nice one or more processes at once, without entering their PIDs. Compared to top, htop launches faster because htop does not wait to collect data upon launch.

Install htop on CentOS with yum

The pre-built htop package is available from EPEL repository. So you need to enable the repository first. Then use yum command to install it.

$ sudo yum install htop

Compile htop from the Source on CentOS

Another option is to compile and install htop from the source. This option is useful when you want to install the latest version of htop.

Here is how to build and install htop from the source.

First, install prerequisites and download the source.

$ sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
$ sudo yum install ncurses-devel
$ wget http://hisham.hm/htop/releases/1.0.3/htop-1.0.3.tar.gz
$ tar xvfvz htop-1.0.3.tar.gz
$ cd htop-1.0.3

Run the configure script to prepare for compilation.

$ ./configure

By default, htop will be installed under /usr/local/bin. If you want to change installation location to something else (e.g., /usr/bin), run configure script with --prefix option instead. For example:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr

Finally, build and install htop as follows.

$ make
$ sudo make install

Launch htop

After installation, launch htop by entering:

$ htop

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