How To Install ClamAV on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ClamAV on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, ClamAV is an open-source (GPL) antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, adware, rootkits, and other malicious threats on Linux. It’s easy to use and best for Linux-based Web and Mail servers.

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 through the step-by-step installation of ClamAV on a Debian 10 (Buster).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or 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 Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing ClamAV on Debian 10.

Run the following command to install ClamAV open source antivirus  on the Debian system:

sudo apt install clamav clamav-daemon

Step 3. Using ClamAV.

Once successfully installed on the Debian system, you need an updated virus database. There are two options for updating the ClamAV database:

• clamav-freshclam: updates the database from the Internet. This is recommended with Internet access.
• Offline update for systems with no direct internet access.

Now we update the virus database with Freshclam:

sudo freshclam

It’ll take a few minutes to complete. When it’s done, restart the service:

sudo systemctl start clamav-daemon
sudo systemctl start clamav-freshclam

Clamscan CLI options and example Usage:

clamscan --infected --remove --recursive /home

Print help information using -h or --help option:

clamscan -h

Congratulations! You have successfully installed ClamAV. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing ClamAV open source antivirus on Debian 10 Buster system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official ClamAV website.