How To Install ClamAV on CentOS 6

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of ClamAV on your CentOS 6. For those of you who didn’t know, ClamAV is an open-source (GPL) antivirus engine designed for detecting viruses, malware, and other malicious threats on Linux.  It’s easy to use and best for Linux-based Web & Mail servers. In this article, I will show you the step-by-step installation of ClamAV on CentOS 6.x from the source.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of ClamAV on a CentOS 6.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 6.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo useror access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install ClamAV on CentOS 6

Step 1. First, add yum the repository to your system.

The EPEL repo is enabled by simply installing an RPM. Please use the command below to install the EPEL repository on your CentOS server.

#CentOS 6 – 32-bit
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.overthewire.com.au/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

#CentOS 6 – 64-bit
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Step 2. Install required ClamAV packages.

yum install clamav clamd

Step 3. Start the clamd service on system boot.

chkconfig clamd on
service clamd start

Update ClamAV’s signatures:

freshclam

Step 4. Configuring daily scan.

In this example, I will configure a cronjob to scan the /home/ directory every day:

nano /etc/cron.daily/clamav_scan

Add the following piece of code to the clamav_scan file.

#!/bin/bash
SCAN_DIR="/home"
LOG_FILE="/var/log/clamav/manual_clamscan.log"
/usr/bin/clamscan -i -r $SCAN_DIR >> $LOG_FILE

Give our cron script executable permissions:

chmod +x /etc/cron.daily/clamav_scan

Congratulations! You have successfully installed ClamAV. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing ClamAV in CentOS 6 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official ClamAV website.