How To Install ClamAV on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ClamAV on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ClamAV is an open-source antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, and other malicious threats. It supports multiple file formats (documents, executables, or archives), utilizes multi-thread scanner features, and receives updates for its signature database at least 2-4 times a day.

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 the ClamAV on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• 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 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install wget apt-transport-https gnupg2

Step 2. Installing ClamAV on Ubuntu 22.04.

By default, ClamAV is not available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install the latest stable version of ClamAV to your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install clamav clamav-daemon

Step 3. Update the ClamAV Signature Database.

If you have internet access, you can use clamav-freshclam to update the ClamAV virus signature database:

sudo freshclam

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

sudo systemctl restart clamav-freshclam

If your system does not have internet access, you can consider setting up a private local mirror using the cvdupdate tool.

Step 4. Scan Files with ClamAV.

Once successfully installed, now we are ready to scan our system. To do this, you can use the “clamscan” command. Print help information using -h or --help option:

clamscan –-help

For example, scan a specific directory using ClamAV:

clamscan /home/

Scan specific files using ClamAV:

clamscan /home/filename.docx

Do not display a summary at the end of scanning.

clamscan --no-summary /home/

Print infected files only (-i, –infected);

clamscan -i /

Skip printing OK files (-o, –suppress-ok-results);

clamscan -o /home/

Congratulations! You have successfully installed ClamAV. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the ClamAV on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official ClamAV website.