How To Install clamav on Debian 12
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install clamav on Debian 12.
What is clamav
clamav is:
Clam AntiVirus is an anti-virus toolkit for Unix. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers (attachment scanning). The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon in the clamav-daemon package, a command-line scanner in the clamav package, and a tool for automatic updating via the Internet in the clamav-freshclam package. The programs are based on libclamav, which can be used by other software.
This package contains the command line interface. Features:
- built-in support for various archive formats, including Zip, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, OLE2, Cabinet, CHM, BinHex, SIS and others;
- built-in support for almost all mail file formats;
- built-in support for ELF executables and Portable Executable files compressed with UPX, FSG, Petite, NsPack, wwpack32, MEW, Upack and obfuscated with SUE, Y0da Cryptor and others;
- built-in support for popular document formats including Microsoft Office and Mac Office files, HTML, RTF and PDF.
For scanning to work, a virus database is needed. There are two options for getting it:
- clamav-freshclam: updates the database from Internet. This is recommended with Internet access.
- clamav-data: for users without Internet access. The package is not updated once installed. The clamav-getfiles package allows creating custom packages from an Internet-connected computer.
There are three methods to install clamav on Debian 12. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install clamav Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install clamav using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install clamav
Install clamav Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install clamav using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install clamav
Install clamav Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install clamav using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install clamav
How To Uninstall clamav on Debian 12
To uninstall only the clamav package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove clamav
Uninstall clamav And Its Dependencies
To uninstall clamav and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 12, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove clamav
Remove clamav Configurations and Data
To remove clamav configuration and data from Debian 12 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge clamav
Remove clamav configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove clamav configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge clamav
Dependencies
clamav have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install clamav package on Debian 12 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.