Installing ClamAV on ubuntu

In this guide, I will talk about how to install ClamAV tools in Ubuntu. Additionally, how to use those tools to scan for local files/folders or using a node environment.

On Ubuntu (v16.04.6)

Setup

The first step is to install the packages clamavand clamav-daemon.

sudo apt-get install clamav clamav-daemon

The clamav installs other dependencies along with it like clamav-freshclam, clamav-base etc.

Next, you will need to start the clamav-freshclam service by running the following command:

sudo service clamav-freshclam restart
sudo service clamav-freshclam status // to verify

This creates a signature file which is required for the next step.

Note: If clamav-freshclam is started for the first time, creation of the signature file takes about 1–3 mins.

Once the signature file is created, you can then start the clamav-daemon service by running the command:

sudo service clamav-daemon start
sudo service clamav-daemon status // to verify

This step creates the clamd socket file (default location is /var/run/clamav/clamd.ctl). Make sure you verify the status of the clamav-daemon. It should not be showing ‘condition failed’ or ‘inactive’ or ‘failed’.

If needed, you can edit the clamd.ctl file to change configuration properties like log location, socket IP etc based on your requirements.

Test file

Once the setup is successfully done, you can use clamscan or clamdscan to run anti-virus checks on your machine.

Using clamscan :

clamscan — 30seconds

Using clamdscan:

clamdscan — less than a second

As you can see, clamdscan takes considerably less time compared to as clamscan and is recommended to use.

ClamAV + Node.js

Since, this is quite a big topic, I have written a separate blog for it which can be found here.