Wordfence CLI is a multi-process malware scanner written in Python. It's designed to have low memory overhead while being able to utilize multiple cores for scanning large filesystems for malware. Wordfence CLI uses libpcre over Python's existing regex libraries for speed and compatibility with our signature set.
We have a number of installation methods to install Wordfence CLI in our installation documentation which we'd recommend reviewing to get you scanning for malware in as few steps as possible. If you'd like to install Wordfence CLI manually, you can clone the GitHub repo to your local environment:
git clone git@github.com:wordfence/wordfence-cli.git
cd ./wordfence-cli
pip install .
python main.py scan --version
You can additionally build the wheel archive and generate an executable:
pip install build~=0.10
python -m build --wheel
pip install dist/wordfence-*.whl
The executable should be installed to ~/.local/bin/wordfence.
- Python >= 3.8
- The C library
libpcre>= 8.38 - Python packages:
packaging>= 23.1requests>= 2.3
Visit https://www.wordfence.com/products/wordfence-cli/ to obtain a license to download our signature set.
You can run wordfence scan --help for a full list of options that can be passed to Wordfence CLI. Read more about the configuration options that can be passed to Wordfence CLI.
Recursively scanning the /var/www directory and writing the results to /home/username/wordfence-cli.csv:
wordfence scan --output-path /home/username/wordfence-cli.csv /var/www
A full list of examples is included in our documentation.
The full documentation for Wordfence CLI can be found here which includes installation instructions, configuration options, detailed examples, and frequently asked questions.
Wordfence CLI is open source, licensed under GPLv3. The license can be found here.