ClamAV® is an open source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware & other malicious threats.
Official documentation can be found online at ClamAV.net. Our source code release tarballs also includes a copy of the documentation for offline reading.
Anyone can learn to read and write ClamAV signatures. To get started, see our signature writing documentation.
ClamAV can be run using Docker, see README.Docker.md and our images on Docker Hub.
For step-by-step instructions, visit our online documentation:
If you have a source tarball from an official release, you can also find a copy of the online documentation in the docs/html directory.
A more comprehensive reference with all of the available build options can be found in the INSTALL.md file.
You can find additional tips for development builds in our online documentation.
For binary package distribution installation instructions, see the Packages section in our online documentation.
We provide installers to install ClamAV on Windows to "C:\Program Files". This install method will require you to have Administrator priveleges.
We also provide a "Portable Install Package" (i.e. a zip of the required files) for users that may wish to run ClamAV without installing it to a system-owned directory.
For details on how to use either option, head over to the Windows Install instructions in the User Manual.
Some tips on how to upgrade from a previous version of ClamAV.
For information about the features in this and prior releases, read the news.
Catch up on the latest about ClamAV by reading our blog and follow us on Twitter @clamav.
The best way to get in touch with the ClamAV community is to join our mailing lists.
You can also join the community on our ClamAV Discord chat server.
The ClamAV development team welcomes code contributions, improvements to our documentation, and also bug reports.
Thanks for joining us!
ClamAV is licensed for public/open source use under the GNU General Public License, Version 2 (GPLv2).
See COPYING.txt for a copy of the license.
ClamAV contains a number of components that include code copied in part or in whole from 3rd party projects and whose code is not owned by Cisco and which are licensed differently than ClamAV. These include:
- tomsfastmath: public domain
- Yara: Apache 2.0 license
- Yara has since switched to the BSD 3-Clause License; Our source is out-of-date and needs to be updated.
- 7z / lzma: public domain
- libclamav's NSIS/NulSoft parser includes:
- zlib: permissive free software license
- bzip2 / libbzip2: BSD-like license
- OpenBSD's libc/regex: BSD license
- file: BSD license
- str.c: Contains BSD licensed modified-implementations of strtol(), stroul() functions, Copyright (c) 1990 The Regents of the University of California.
- pngcheck (png.c): MIT/X11-style license
- getopt.c: MIT license
- Curl: license inspired by MIT/X, but not identical
- libmspack: LGPL license
- UnRAR (libclamunrar): a non-free/restricted open source license
- Note: The UnRAR license is incompatible with GPLv2 because it contains a clause that prohibits reverse engineering a RAR compression algorithm from the UnRAR decompression code. For this reason, libclamunrar/libclamunrar_iface is not linked at all with libclamav. It is instead loaded at run-time. If it fails to load, ClamAV will continue running without RAR support.
See the COPYING directory for a copy of the 3rd party project licenses.