This document describes how to build ClamAV on Windows using Visual Studio. For information on how to use ClamAV, please refer to our User Manual.
ClamAV 0.101 removes the old Visual Studio Installer Projects files (Setup-x64.vdproj, Setup-x86.vdproj). In their place we now build an installer using Inno Setup that is capable of installing ClamAV on both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures with one installer.
For more details, see the instructions below on how to build ClamAV.
In order to support more advanced features planned in future releases, ClamAV has switched to using OpenSSL for hashing. The ClamAV Visual Studio project included with ClamAV's source code requires the OpenSSL distributables to be placed in a specific directory. This article will teach you how to compile OpenSSL on a Microsoft Windows system and how to link ClamAV against OpenSSL.
Starting from version 0.98 the windows version of ClamAV requires all the input to be UTF-8 encoded.
This affects:
- the API, notably the cl_scanfile() function
- clamd socket input, e.g. the commands SCAN, CONTSCAN, MUTLISCAN, etc.
- clamd socket output, i.e replies to the above queries
For legacy reasons ANSI (i.e. CP_ACP) input will still be accepted and processed as before, but with two important remarks: First, socket replies to ANSI queries will still be UTF-8 encoded. Second, ANSI sequences which are also valid UTF-8 sequences will be handled as UTF-8.
As a side note, console output (stdin and stderr) will always be OEM encoded, even when redirected to a file.
To build the source code you will need:
- Git for Windows with a git "shell"
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2015: the community version is just fine.
To build the installer, you also need:
ClamAV is supported for Windows 7+, but Windows 10 is recommended. Visual Studio 2017 should work fine, but we currently work with Visual Studio 2015.
ClamAV source code is freely available on GitHub
To obtain a copy of the code, open a Git Bash terminal. Navigate to a directory where you want to store the code, eg "workspace" and clone the repository using the https web URL. For example:
cd
mkdir workspace
cd workspace
git clone https://github.com/vrtadmin/clamav-devel.git
Step into the win32 directory and open an Explorer window.
cd clamav-devel
cd win32
explorer .
ClamAV for Windows uses the same code base as Unix/Linux based operating systems. However, Windows specific files for building ClamAV are found under the win32 directory.
After downloading the source code, minimal configuration is required:
- Run the
win32/configure.bat
script from within the git shell. Skip this step if you are building from an official release tarball. - Obtain OpenSSL V1.1.0 or higher. You will need the headers, libs, and bins for the platform (Win32 or x64) that you're targeting.
- Place the headers and binaries in a directory with the following structure:
C:\clam_dependencies │ ├───vcredist │ ├───vc_redist.x64.exe <-- VS 2015 Redistributables installer (x64) │ └───vc_redist.x86.exe <-- VS 2015 Redistributables installer (x86) ├───Win32 │ ├───include │ │ └───openssl <-- openssl headers here │ └───lib <-- .DLLs and .LIBs here └───x64 ├───include │ └───openssl <-- openssl headers here └───lib <-- .DLLs and .LIBs here
- Add an environment variable with the name
CLAM_DEPENDENCIES
and set the value to the path of the above directory. - At present, the Inno Setup script
ClamAV-Installer.iss
requires this directory to be located specifically atC:\clam_dependencies
in order to build the installer:
Open win32/ClamAV.sln
in Visual Studio and build all.
The output directory for the binaries is either /win32/(Win32|x64)/Debug
or
/win32/(Win32|x64)/Release
depending on the configuration you pick.
Alternatively, you can build from the command line (aka cmd.exe
) by following these steps:
x64:
call "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\\VC\\vcvarsall.bat" x64
setx CLAM_DEPENDENCIES "C:\\clam_dependencies"
call configure.bat
devenv ClamAV.sln /Clean "Release|x64" /useenv /ProjectConfig "Release|x64"
devenv ClamAV.sln /Rebuild "Release|x64" /useenv /ProjectConfig "Release|x64"'''
x86:
reg Query "HKLM\\Hardware\\Description\\System\\CentralProcessor\\0" | find /i "x86" > NUL && set OS=32BIT || set OS=64BIT
if %OS%==32BIT call "C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\\VC\\vcvarsall.bat" x86
if %OS%==64BIT call "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\\VC\\vcvarsall.bat" x86
setx CLAM_DEPENDENCIES "C:\\clam_dependencies"
call configure.bat
devenv ClamAV.sln /Clean "Release|Win32" /useenv /ProjectConfig "Release|Win32"
devenv ClamAV.sln /Rebuild "Release|Win32" /useenv /ProjectConfig "Release|Win32"'''
To build the installer:
- Build ClamAV for both
x64
andWin32
. The installer requires both versions to be available. - Open
win32\ClamAV-Installer.iss
using Inno Setup 5. - Run "Compile".
Alternatively, you can invoke the Inno Setup command line installer from cmd.exe:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Inno Setup 5\ISCC.exe" .\ClamAV-Installer.iss
After compilation, the installer will be located at win32\ClamAV-<version>.exe
The ClamAV tools in win32
are the same as in unix, so refer to their respective
manpage for general usage.
The major differences are listed below:
-
Config files path search order:
- The content of the registry key: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/ClamAV/ConfDir"
- The directory where libclamav.dll is located: "C:\Program Files\ClamAV"
- "C:\ClamAV"
-
Database files path search order:
- The content of the registry key: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/ClamAV/DataDir"
- The directory "database" inside the directory where libclamav.dll is located: "C:\Program Files\ClamAV\database"
- "C:\ClamAV\db"
-
Globbing Since the Windows command prompt doesn't take care of wildcard expansion, minimal emulation of unix glob() is performed internally. It supports "*" and "?" only.
-
File paths Please always use the backslash as the path separator. SMB Network shares and UNC paths are supported.
-
Debug builds Malloc in Debug (as opposed to release) mode fails after allocating some 90k chunks; such builds won't be able to handle large databases. Just do yourself a favour and always build in Release mode.
Special thanks to Gianluigi Tiesi and Mark Pizzolato for their valuable help in coding and testing.