Table of Contents
The following must be installed in order to build Wireshark:
Either make or Ninja can be used to build Wireshark; at least one of those must be installed.
To build the manual pages, Developer’s Guide and User’s Guide, Asciidoctor, Xsltproc, and DocBook must be installed.
Perl is required to generate some code and run some code analysis checks.
Some features of Wireshark require additional libraries to be installed. The processes for doing so on various UN*X families is shown here.
There are shell scripts in the tools directory to install the packages
and libraries required to build Wireshark. Usage is available with the
--help option. root permission is required to run the scripts.
The available scripts and their options for a given family of UN*Xes are
shown in the section for that family.
The setup script is tools/alpine-setup.sh; its options are:
--install-optional install optional software as well
--install-all install everything
[other] other options are passed as-is to apk
The setup script is tools/arch-setup.sh; its options are:
--install-optional install optional software as well
--install-test-deps install packages required to run all tests
--install-all install everything
[other] other options are passed as-is to pacman
The setup script is tools/bsd-setup.sh; its options are:
--install-optional install optional software as well
[other] other options are passed as-is to pkg manager
The setup script is tools/debian-setup.sh; its options are:
--install-optional install optional software as well
--install-deb-deps install packages required to build the .deb file
--install-test-deps install packages required to run all tests
--install-qt5-deps force installation of packages required to use Qt5
--install-qt6-deps force installation of packages required to use Qt6
--install-all install everything
[other] other options are passed as-is to apt
The setup script is tools/rpm-setup.sh; its options are:
--install-optional install optional software as well
--install-rpm-deps install packages required to build the .rpm file
--install-qt5-deps force installation of packages required to use Qt5
--install-qt6-deps force installation of packages required to use Qt6
--install-all install everything
[other] other options are passed as-is to the packet manager
You must first install Xcode.
There are two scripts available for macOS which will install the packages and libraries required to build Wireshark and its documentation:
tools/macos-setup-brew.sh, which will use the Homebrew package manager and tools/macos-setup.sh, which will build any required libraries and tools locally, except for Qt 6.
tools/macos-setup-brew.sh supports the following options:
--install-optional install optional software as well
--install-dmg-deps install packages required to build the .dmg file
--install-sparkle-deps install the Sparkle automatic updater
--install-all install everything
--install-stratoshark install everything to compile Stratoshark and Falco bridge
[other] other options are passed as-is to brew
tools/macos-setup.sh supports the following options:
-n dry run; don’t build or install any packages
-p specify the installation prefix; /usr/local is the default
-t specify the minimum macOS target version
-u uninstall packages
We recommend tools/macos-setup-brew.sh if you’re using Homebrew and you don’t need to worry about backward compatibility with older macOS releases.
If you will be building Wireshark with Qt 6, which is the default for
Wireshark 4.0 and later, you will also have to install Qt; the
tools/macos-setup.sh script will not install Qt 6. To install
Qt, go to the Download Qt
for open source use page, select “macOS” if it’s not already selected,
and then select “Qt online installer for macOS“. This will download a
.dmg for the installer; launch the installer. It will require that you
log into your Qt account; if you don’t have an account, select “Sign up“
to create one. The next page will require you to accept the LGPL (Lesser
GNU Public License); do so. Continue to the “Installation Folder“ page
of the installer screen, and select the “Custom installation“ option.
On the “Select Components“ screen of the installer, select, for the
desired Qt version, the “macOS” component. For example, at the time of
this writing the Qt 6.5.3 “macOS” component is used to build
the official packages. The “Qt Debug Information Files” component
contains dSYM files which can be used for debugging. You can deselect
all of the other the components such as “Qt Charts” or “Android xxxx”
as they aren’t required.
Qt 6 needs the "Qt 5 Compatibility Module" to be installed as well. Additionally, the module "Qt Multimedia" may be installed, to support advanced controls for playing back streams in the RTP Player dialog.
Before building:
On macOS, you will need to set the Qt installation directory in the environment:
WIRESHARK_QT6_PREFIX_PATH=~/Qt/6.5.3/macos export WIRESHARK_QT6_PREFIX_PATH
If you want to append a custom string to the package version, run the command
WIRESHARK_VERSION_EXTRA=-YourExtraVersionInfo export WIRESHARK_VERSION_EXTRA
The recommended (and fastest) way to build Wireshark is with CMake and Ninja. Building with make took nearly 2x time as Ninja in one experiment.
CMake builds are best done in a separate build directory, such as a
build subdirectory of the top-level source directory.
If that directory is a subdirectory of the top-level source directory,
to generate the build files, change to the build directory and enter the
following command:
cmake ..
to use make as the build tool or
cmake -G Ninja ..
to use Ninja as the build tool.
If you created the build directory in the same directory that contains the top-level Wireshark source directory, to generate the build files, change to the build directory and enter the following command:
cmake ../{source directory}
to use make as the build tool or
cmake -G Ninja ../{source directory}
to use Ninja as the build tool.
{source directory} is the name of the
top-level Wireshark source directory.
If you need to build with a non-standard configuration, you can run
cmake -LH ../{source directory}
to see what options you have.
You can then run Ninja or make to build Wireshark.
ninja # or make
Once you have build Wireshark with ninja or make above, you should be able to test it
by entering run/wireshark.
Install Wireshark in its final destination:
make install
Once you have installed Wireshark with make install above, you should be able
to run it by entering wireshark.
To build the Wireshark User’s Guide and the Wireshark Developer’s Guide,
build the all_guides target, e.g. make all_guides or ninja
all_guides. Detailed information to build these guides can be found in
the file doc/README.documentation.adoc in the Wireshark sources.
You can create packages using the following build targets and commands:
dist target.
dpkg-buildpackage.
wireshark_rpm target.
wireshark_appimage target.
wireshark_dmg or stratoshark_dmg targets.
Installable packages typically require building Wireshark first.
A number of errors can occur during the build and installation process. Some hints on solving these are provided here.
If the cmake stage fails you will need to find out why. You can check the
file CMakeOutput.log and CMakeError.log in the build directory to find
out what failed. The last few lines of this file should help in determining the
problem.
The standard problems are that you do not have a required development package on your system or that the development package isn’t new enough. Note that installing a library package isn’t enough. You need to install its development package as well.
If you cannot determine what the problems are, send an email to the
wireshark-dev mailing list explaining your problem. Include the output from
cmake and anything else you think is relevant such as a trace of the
make stage.