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 Developer’s Guide and the User’s Guide, Asciidoctor, Xsltproc, and DocBook must be installed.

Some features of Wireshark require additional libraries to be installed.

For Debian, and for Linux distributions based on Debian, such as Ubuntu, the script tools/debian-setup.sh will install the packages and libraries required to build Wireshark. It supports the command-line options:

For RPM-based Linux distributions such as Red Hat, Centos, Fedora, and openSUSE, the script tools/rpm-setup.sh will install the packages and libraries required to build Wireshark. It supports the command-line options:

For Alpine Linux, the script tools/alpine-setup.sh will install the packages and libraries required to build Wireshark. It supports the --install-optional command-line option to install additional tools and to install libraries required for all Wireshark features.

For FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD, the script tools/bsd-setup.sh will install the packages and libraries required to build Wireshark. It supports the --install-optional command-line option to install additional tools and to install libraries required for all Wireshark features.

For macOS, you must first install Xcode. After installing Xcode, the script tools/macos-setup.sh will install the rest of the tools and libraries required to build Wireshark, as well as the additional tools required to build the documentation and the libraries required for all Wireshark features. If you’re using Homebrew, the script tools/macos-setup-brew.sh will intall the same tools and libraries from Homebrew.

If an install package is not available or you have a reason not to use it (maybe because it’s simply too old), you can install that tool from source code. The following sections will provide you with the webpage addresses where you can get these sources.

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 create the build tool 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.

You can then run make or Ninja to build 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 docbook\README.adoc in the Wireshark sources.

To create a source code tarball, build the dist target.

To create an installable package after successfully building Wireshark: