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Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin client

Licence: MIT Licence
Author: Thomas Voegtlin
Language: Python (>= 3.8)
Homepage: https://electrum.org/

Build Status Test coverage statistics Help translate Electrum online

Getting started

(If you've come here looking to simply run Electrum, you may download it here.)

Electrum itself is pure Python, and so are most of the required dependencies, but not everything. The following sections describe how to run from tar.gz or from source.

Running from tar.gz

If you downloaded the official package (tar.gz), you can run Electrum from its root directory without installing it on your system; all the pure python dependencies are included in the 'packages' directory. You will need to install a few system dependencies:

To use the desktop GUI (Qt6):

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt6

Due to the need for fast symmetric ciphers, cryptography is required. Install from your package manager:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-cryptography

To run Electrum from its root directory, just do:

$ ./run_electrum

This method currently lacks hardware wallet support. If you need hardware wallet support, you should install as described below

Install to a python virtualenv

Create a python virtualenv

$ python3 -m venv $HOME/electrum

When the virtualenv is created or already exists, activate it:

$ . $HOME/electrum/bin/activate

Install electrum and dependencies

$ pip install .[gui,crypto,hardware]

This will install Electrum and all required dependencies, including for Qt desktop GUI and hardware wallets.

Not pure-python dependencies

For elliptic curve operations, libsecp256k1 is a required dependency:

$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-dev

Alternatively, when running from a cloned repository, a script is provided to build libsecp256k1 yourself:

$ sudo apt-get install automake libtool
$ ./contrib/make_libsecp256k1.sh

For more information about hardware wallet dependencies, see this.

To run Electrum, just do:

$ electrum

Or, without first activating the virtualenv:

$ $HOME/electrum/bin/electrum

Development version (git clone)

(For OS-specific instructions, see here for Windows, and for macOS)

Check out the code from GitHub:

$ git clone https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum.git
$ cd electrum
$ git submodule update --init

create and activate virtualenv

$ python3 -m venv $HOME/electrum
$ . $HOME/electrum/bin/activate

Run install (this should install dependencies):

$ pip install -e .[gui,crypto,hardware]

Create translations (optional):

$ sudo apt-get install python3-requests gettext qt6-l10n-tools
$ ./contrib/pull_locale

Finally, to start Electrum:

$ ./run_electrum

Run tests

Run unit tests with pytest:

$ pytest tests -v

To run a single file, specify it directly like this:

$ pytest tests/test_bitcoin.py -v

Creating Binaries

Contributing

Any help testing the software, reporting or fixing bugs, reviewing pull requests and recent changes, writing tests, or helping with outstanding issues is very welcome. Implementing new features, or improving/refactoring the codebase, is of course also welcome, but to avoid wasted effort, especially for larger changes, we encourage discussing these on the issue tracker or IRC first.

Besides GitHub, most communication about Electrum development happens on IRC, in the #electrum channel on Libera Chat. The easiest way to participate on IRC is with the web client, web.libera.chat.