How To Install ClamAV on Fedora 37

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ClamAV on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Clam is an open-source antivirus engine that is used for trojans, viruses, malware and other malicious threats. ClamAV offers a Command-line scanner, a Milter interface for Sendmail, an Advanced database updater, and built-in support for archive formats, ELF executables + Portable Executable files, and popular document formats. It was developed for Unix and has third-party versions available for AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Linux, macOS, OSF, and Solaris.

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 Fedora 37.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Fedora 37.
• 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 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 Fedora 37

Step 1. Before proceeding, update your Fedora operating system to make sure all existing packages are up to date. Use this command to update the server packages:

sudo dnf upgrade
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Installing ClamAV on Fedora 37.

By default, the ClamAV package comes in the default repository of Fedora 37. Now run the following command below to install the FileZilla package to your Fedora system:

sudo dnf install clamav clamd clamav-update

Now we will start the Clam service and set it to enable it at boot time:

sudo systemctl enable clamav-freshclam --now
sudo systemctl start freshclam

Step 3. Update the ClamAV Virus Database.

Firstly, you need to stop the ClamAV service before you can update. To do this, run the following command below:

sudo systemctl stop clamav-freshclam

Next, you can proceed to update your virus definition database by the following terminal command:

sudo freshclam

After the database is updated, you can start the ClamAV service using the following command:

sudo systemctl enable clamav-freshclam --now

Step 4. Scan with ClamAV on Fedora.

• To scan a specific file, run the command below followed by the file name.

sudo clamscan filename

• To scan a specific directory, run the following command followed by a directory name.

sudo clamscan -r directoryname

• To remove threats found in the file, run the command below followed by the filename.

sudo clamscan --remove filename

• To remove threats found in the directory, run the following command followed by the directory name.

sudo clamscan -r --remove directoryname

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

clamscan -h

Congratulations! You have successfully installed ClamAV. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing ClamAV on your Fedora 37 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official ClamAV website.