See also https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/wikis/Development and the Developer's Guide located at https://www.wireshark.org/docs/ and in the doc/ subdirectory. Installation ============ These are installation instructions for Unix and Unix-like systems. These are not the installation instructions for Windows systems; see the Wireshark User's Guide and Wireshark Developer's Guide at https://www.wireshark.org/docs/ for those. 0. This is software. Beware. 1. If you wish to build Wireshark, make sure you have the Qt and GLib development packages installed. Try running 'pkg-config glib-2.0 --modversion' to see if you have GLib 2.x installed. Then try running 'pkg-config Qt5Widgets --modversion' to see if you have Qt installed. Wireshark requires Qt 5.9 or later, but the most recent LTS release is strongly recommended. It needs version 2.50.0 or above of GLib. If you need to install or re-install GLIB, you can find the packages at: https://download.gnome.org/sources/glib/ You can find Qt at: https://www.qt.io/download If you installed Qt or GLib from binary packages, you may have to install corresponding "development" packages; there may be separate "user's" and "developer's" packages, with the former not including header files and the like. For example, Red Hat users will need to install a "glib2-devel" .rpm. 2. If you wish to build TShark, the line-mode version of Wireshark, make sure you have GLib installed. See note #1 above for instructions on checking if you have GLib installed. 3. If you want to capture packets, make sure you have libpcap installed. The latest "official" version can be found at https://www.tcpdump.org . If you installed libpcap from a binary package, you may have to install a "development" package; for example, there's apparently a "libpcap0" Debian package, but it just includes a shared library, a copyright notice, changelog files, and a README.md file - you also need to install a "libpcap-dev" package to get header files, a non-shared library, and the man page. Similarly, Red Hat users will need to install a "libpcap-devel" .rpm to go along with the "libpcap" .rpm. 4. Building Wireshark requires Python, flex, and Asciidoctor. 5. Create a build directory separate from the source directory. It can be anywhere, but you might run into issues if the path contains spaces. 6. Run 'cmake ' in your build directory. Running 'cmake -LH ' displays a complete list of options. The "Tool Reference" section of Developer's Guide contains general instructions for using CMake. Some of the Wireshark-specific options are as follows: -G Ninja CMake supports many different build systems, including UNIX Make, MSBuild, and Ninja. UNIX Make is the default, but Ninja tends to be faster. -DBUILD_wireshark=OFF By default CMake tries to find the Qt libraries so Wireshark, the GUI packet analyzer, can be built. You can disable the build of the GUI version of Wireshark with this switch. -DBUILD_tshark=OFF By default the line-mode packet analyzer, TShark, is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_editcap=OFF By default the capture-file editing program is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_capinfos=OFF By default the capture-file statistics reporting program is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_captype=OFF By default the capture-type reporting program is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_mergecap=OFF By default the capture-file merging program is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_reordercap=OFF By default the capture-file reordering program is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_text2pcap=OFF By default the hex-dump-to-capture file conversion program is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_dftest=OFF By default the display-filter-compiler test program is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_randpkt=OFF By default the program which creates random packet-capture files is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_dumpcap=OFF By default the network traffic capture program is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DBUILD_rawshark=OFF By default the program used to dump and analyze raw libpcap data is built. Use this switch to avoid building it. -DDUMPCAP_INSTALL_OPTION=suid -DDUMPCAP_INSTALL_OPTION=capabilities Wireshark and TShark rely on dumpcap for packet capture. Setting this flag to "suid" installs dumpcap with setuid root permissions, which lets any user on the system capture live traffic. If this is not desired, you can restrict dumpcap's permissions so that only a single user or group can run it and set the "capabilities" flag. Running Wireshark or TShark as root is not recommended. -DENABLE_CAP=OFF By default, if 'cmake' finds libcap (the POSIX capabilities library) dumpcap will be built so that if it is installed setuid root, it will attempt to retain CAP_NET_RAW and CAP_NET_ADMIN before dropping root privileges. Use this option to disable this behavior. -DENABLE_PCAP=OFF If you choose to build a packet analyzer that can analyze capture files but cannot capture packets on its own, but you *do* have libpcap installed, or if you are trying to build Wireshark on a system that doesn't have libpcap installed (in which case you have no choice but to build a version that can analyze capture files but cannot capture packets on its own), use -DENABLE_PCAP=OFF to avoid using libpcap. -DENABLE_ZLIB=OFF By default, if 'cmake' finds zlib (a.k.a, libz), the wiretap library will be built so that it can read compressed capture files. If you have zlib but do not wish to build it into the wiretap library, used by Wireshark, TShark, and the capture-file utilities that come in this package, use this switch. -DENABLE_BROTLI=OFF By default, if 'cmake' finds brotli, the wiretap library will be built so that it can read brotli compressed capture files. If you have brotli but do not wish to build it into the wiretap library, used by Wireshark, TShark, and the capture-file utilities that come in this package, use this switch. -DENABLE_PLUGINS=OFF By default, if your system can support run-time loadable modules, the packet analyzers are build with support for plugins. Use this switch to build packet analyzers without plugin support. 7. After running 'cmake', you will see a summary of some of the options you chose. Ensure that the summary reflects what you want. If it doesn't, re-run 'cmake' with new options. 8. Run 'make', or 'ninja' if you chose to create Ninja build files. Hopefully, you won't run into any problems. 9. Run './run/wireshark' or './run/tshark' or ./run/dumpcap, and make sure things are working. You must have root privileges in order to capture live data. 10./a. Run 'make install'. If you're running a system that supports the RPM packaging systems you can run make wireshark_rpm or ninja wireshark_rpm to make an installable package for your system. The installation path defaults to /usr/local, so you'll probably want to pass -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr to CMake. 10/b. If you 're running a system that supports APT (Debian/Ubuntu/etc.) run ln -sn packaging/debian dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot in the source directory right after extracting of checking out Wireshark's source code. (You don't have to run CMake/make/Ninja/etc. prior to running dpkg-buildpackage) If you have trouble with the build or installation process, you can find assistance on the wireshark-users and wireshark-dev mailing lists (see https://www.wireshark.org/lists/ for details) or the Wireshark Q&A site: https://ask.wireshark.org .