Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin client

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

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 source, but here is a TL;DR:

$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-0
$ python3 -m pip install --user ".[gui,crypto]"

Not pure-python dependencies

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

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt5

For elliptic curve operations, libsecp256k1 is a required dependency:

$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-0

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

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

If you would like hardware wallet support, see this.

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. 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)

(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 python-requests gettext
$ ./contrib/pull_locale

Finally, to start Electrum:

$ ./run_electrum

Run tests

Run unit tests with pytest:

$ pytest electrum/tests -v

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

$ pytest electrum/tests/test_bitcoin.py -v

Creating Binaries

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

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.