README Copy Section

Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin client

Licence: MIT Licence
Author: Thomas Voegtlin
Language: Python (>= 3.10)
Homepage: https://electrum.org/

[](https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/actions/workflows/builds.yml)
[](https://coveralls.io/github/spesmilo/electrum?branch=master)
[](https://crowdin.com/project/electrum)

Getting started Copy Chapter

_(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 source, but here
is a TL;DR:

$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-dev
$ ELECTRUM_ECC_DONT_COMPILE=1 python3 -m pip install --user ".[gui,crypto]"

Not pure-python dependencies Copy Section

#### Qt GUI

If you want to use the Qt interface, install the Qt dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt6

#### libsecp256k1

For elliptic curve operations,
libsecp256k1
is a required dependency.

If you "pip install" Electrum, by default libsecp will get compiled locally,
as part of the electrum-ecc dependency. This can be opted-out of,
by setting the ELECTRUM_ECC_DONT_COMPILE=1 environment variable.
For the compilation to work, besides a C compiler, you need at least:

$ sudo apt-get install automake libtool

$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-dev

#### cryptography

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

$ sudo apt-get install python3-cryptography

#### hardware-wallet support

If you would like hardware wallet support,
see this.

Running from tar.gz Copy Section

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. To run Electrum from its root directory, just do:

$ ./run_electrum

You can also install Electrum on your system, by running this command:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools python3-pip
$ python3 -m pip install --user .

This will download and install the Python dependencies used by
Electrum instead of using the 'packages' directory.
It will also place an executable named electrum in ~/.local/bin,
so make sure that is on your PATH variable.

Development version (git clone) Copy Section

_(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

Run install (this should install dependencies):

$ python3 -m pip install --user -e .

Create translations (optional):

$ sudo apt-get install gettext
$ ./contrib/locale/build_locale.sh electrum/locale/locale electrum/locale/locale

Finally, to start Electrum:

$ ./run_electrum

Run tests Copy Section

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 Copy Chapter

- Linux (tarball)
- Linux (AppImage)
- macOS
- Windows
- Android

Contributing Copy Chapter

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.

Please improve translations on Crowdin.

---

SECURITY Copy Section

Two main ways to responsibly report security issues privately:

1. (preferred) if you have a GitHub account, use the built-in
"Report a vulnerability"
flow, or
2. you can send an email to the addresses listed below.
(Not for support. Support requests will be ignored.)

If using email, please send any report to all emails listed here.

| Name | Email | GPG fingerprint |
|-------------|----------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------------|
| ThomasV | thomasv [AT] electrum [DOT] org | 6694 D8DE 7BE8 EE56 31BE D950 2BD5 824B 7F94 70E6 |
| SomberNight | somber.night [AT] protonmail [DOT] com | 4AD6 4339 DFA0 5E20 B3F6 AD51 E7B7 48CD AF5E 5ED9 |

These GPG public keys can be found in the Electrum git repository,
in the top-level pubkeys folder.

---