pcap files to collect and record packet data from a network. See Section 5.2, “Windows Automated Library Download” for details.Packet Capture or PCAP (also known as libpcap) is an application programming interface (API) that captures live network packet data from OSI model Layers 2-7.

With the exception of Qt, all libraries required to build Wireshark on Windows are available for download at They can be installed using tools/win-setup.ps1 and are automatically installed when you run CMake. Windows doesn’t have a good library package manager at the present time, so we provide our own pre-built libraries. We also provide tools/macos-setup.sh, which will download, build, and install required packages. On macOS, you can install pre-built packages using a third party package manager such as Homebrew or MacPorts.Īs with Linux, we provide tools/macos-setup-brew.sh, which will install the required Homebrew packages. See Section 2.1.1, “Build environment setup” for details.

We provide setup scripts that will install the required packages for most distributions.

On most Linux systems, the required binary and development libraries can be installed using your package manager. They can be compiled by hand, but are most often installed as pre-built packages. While running Wireshark only requires the libraries themselves, building it requires header files, import libraries, and related resources.īinary libraries are available in different formats and are specific to the target operating system, platform, and compiler. Like most applications, Wireshark depends on libraries provided by your operating system and by third parties, including the C runtime library, GLib, libpcap, and Qt.

Wireshark pcap library