Table of Contents

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Obtaining the source and binary distributions

2.3. Installing Wireshark under Windows

2.3.1. Installation Components

2.3.2. Additional Tasks

2.3.3. Install Location

2.3.4. Installing Npcap

2.3.5. Windows installer command line options

2.3.6. Manual Npcap Installation

2.3.7. Update Npcap

2.3.8. Uninstall Wireshark

2.3.9. Uninstall Npcap

2.4. Building from source under Windows

2.5. Installing Wireshark under macOS

2.6. Installing the binaries under UNIX

2.6.1. Installing from RPMs under Red Hat and alike

2.6.2. Installing from debs under Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives

2.6.3. Installing from portage under Gentoo Linux

2.6.4. Installing from packages under FreeBSD

2.7. Building from source under UNIX or Linux

2.8. Updating Wireshark

As with all things there must be a beginning and so it is with Wireshark. To use Wireshark you must first install it. If you are running Windows or macOS you can download an official release at https://www.wireshark.org/download.html, install it, and skip the rest of this chapter.

If you are running another operating system such as Linux or FreeBSD you might want to install from source. Several Linux distributions offer Wireshark packages but they commonly provide out-of-date versions. No other versions of UNIX ship Wireshark so far. For that reason, you will need to know where to get the latest version of Wireshark and how to install it.

This chapter shows you how to obtain source and binary packages and how to build Wireshark from source should you choose to do so.

The general steps are the following: