Installing ClamAV
Installing with a Package Manager
ClamAV is widely available from third party package managers for most operating systems. This is often the quickest way to install ClamAV. It will make also upgrades easier.
Check out the Packages page to find installation instructions for your system.
Installing with an Installer
Pre-compiled packages provided on the clamav.net downloads page have all external library dependencies statically compiled in.
These installers likely differ from packages provided by other packaging tools in that you will need to create and configure the freshclam.conf and clamd.conf files. You may also need to add a clamav service user account and adjust the permissions on the database directory. We hope to round out these sharp corners in the future and to make setup more convenient, but for now be advised that setup from one of these packages is a little bit more work than you may be used to.
If you're interested in learning how these packages were built, you can check out these development instructions.
Note: In the event that a vulnerability is found in one of the dependencies that may impact ClamAV, we will publish new packages with updated dependencies as soon as we're able.
Linux (.deb, .rpm)
Beginning with ClamAV 0.104, we offer Debian and RPM packages for x86_64 (64bit) and i686 (32bit) architectures. This will make it easier to get the latest version in the event that a package for your distribution is not readily available and you would prefer not to build ClamAV from source.
Note: These packages do not presently include
clamav-milter. You can help help us addclamav-milterto the packages by developing a Mussels recipe for building the libmilter.a static library and contributing it to our Mussels cookbook.
RPM packages (for CentOS, Redhat, Fedora, SUSE, etc.)
These are compiled on CentOS 7. They should be compatible with all RPM-based linux distributions running glibc version 2.17 or newer.
To install, download the package for your system use yum or dnf to install the package. For example:
sudo dnf install ~/Downloads/clamav-0.104.0-rc2.linux.x86_64.rpm
You can verify that the package was installed using:
dnf info clamav
This package installs to /usr/local.
Unlike packages provided by Debian or other distributions, this package does not presently include a preconfigured freshclam.conf, clamd.conf, database directory, or clamav user accounts for FreshClam and ClamD. You can follow these instructions to configure FreshClam and ClamD. You can follow these instructions to create the clamav user account for running FreshClam and ClamD services.
And uninstall the package with:
sudo dnf remove ~/Downloads/clamav-0.104.0-rc2.linux.x86_64.rpm
DEB packages (for Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.)
These are compiled on Ubuntu 18.04, and have all external library dependencies statically compiled in. They should be compatible with all Debian-based linux distributions running glibc version 2.27 or newer.
sudo apt install ~/Downloads/clamav-0.104.0-rc2.libnux.x86_64.deb
You can verify that the package was installed using:
apt info clamav
This package installs to /usr/local.
Unlike packages provided by Debian or other distributions, this package does not presently include a preconfigured freshclam.conf, clamd.conf, database directory, or clamav user accounts for FreshClam and ClamD. You can follow these instructions to configure FreshClam and ClamD. You can follow these instructions to create the clamav user account for running FreshClam and ClamD services.
And uninstall the package with:
sudo apt remove clamav
macOS
Beginning with ClamAV 0.104, we offer a PKG installer for macOS. These are universal binaries built for Intel x86_64 and Apple M1 arm64 processors.
To install, download the macOS .pkg installer. Double-click the installer and follow the directions.
This package installs to /usr/local/clamav. This is not in the default system PATH environment variable. You may wish to add /usr/local/clamav/bin and /usr/local/clamav/sbin to your PATH so you can run the ClamAV programs without entering the full path. To do this add this line to ~/.zshrc:
export PATH=/usr/local/clamav/bin:/usr/local/clamav/sbin:$PATH
Then run source ~/.zshrc or open a new terminal.
Unlike packages provided by Homebrew, this package does not presently include a preconfigured freshclam.conf, clamd.conf, or database directory. You can follow these instructions to configure FreshClam and ClamD.
macOS package installers do not provide a mechanism for automatically uninstalling the package. In the future, we hope to add a script to aid with uninstallation. But for now, to make it easier to remove, our macOS installer installs to /usr/local/clamav. To uninstall, all you need to do is run:
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/clamav
Windows
The ClamAV team provides official ClamAV builds for Windows on the ClamAV downloads page. You can choose between a traditional executable installer or a portable install ZIP package.
To use the executable installer, double-click the installer and follow the instructions.
To install from a ZIP package, unzip the portable install package to any directory.
Official ClamAV Docker Images
There are now official ClamAV images on Docker Hub. You can find the images on Docker Hub under clamav.
At present we offer images with builds of the latest development version. We call this "unstable". ClamAV 0.104 will be the first stable release that we'll publish on Docker Hub.. Once published 0.104.0+ will be available using a Docker image tag with the specific version number, or using "stable" to get the latest stable release.
Check out the Docker page to learn how to install and use ClamAV with Docker.
Installing from Source
If you need, you can also compile and install ClamAV from source:
What now?
Now that ClamAV is installed, you will want to customize your configuration and perhaps set up some scanning automation and alerting mechanisms.