Installing ScanCode

Note

ScanCode requires a Python version between 3.9 to 3.13 and is tested on Linux, macOS, and Windows

Method

Description

Install ScanCode from releases archives
Our recommended method for new users is to install Python, download and extract
the latest release archive to run ScanCode.
No knowledge of pip, git, or other developer tools is required for standard usage.

Install ScanCode using docker
Install ScanCode from its Git source code repository using Docker

An alternative to installing the latest ScanCode-Toolkit release natively is
to build a Docker image from the included Dockerfile. The only prerequisite
is a working Docker installation.

Install ScanCode from source
Install ScanCode from its Git source code repository using the configure script

Clone the git source code repository and then run the configure script
to configure and install ScanCode for local and development usage.

Install ScanCode using pip
Install ScanCode using pip from Python Package Index (PyPI)

To use ScanCode as a library in your application, you can install it via
pip. This is recommended for developers or users familiar with Python
that want to embed ScanCode as a library

Install from Fedora’s repository
ScanCode is part of main Fedora Linux repository in Fedora 40 and newer.
This is recommended for production deployments.

Install ScanCode from the command line interface using:
dnf install scancode-toolkit

To uninstall ScanCode, run:

dnf remove scancode-toolkit

Installation prerequisites

System requirements

  • Hardware : ScanCode will run best with a modern X86 64 bits processor and at least 8GB of RAM and 2GB of disk space. These are minimum requirements.

  • Supported operating systems: ScanCode should run on these 64-bit OSes running X86_64 processors:

    • Linux: any recent 64-bit Linux distributions

    • Mac (Intel): x86 64-bit macOS 10.15 or newer

    • Mac (Apple Silicon): use the X86 emulation mode on Apple ARM M1 CPUs.
      (Note that pip install does not work on ARM CPUs)

    • Windows: Windows 10 or newer

    • FreeBSD

Required packages

ScanCode needs a Python 3.9+ interpreter; We support all Python versions from 3.9 to 3.12. The default version for the application archives is Python 3.9

Linux

Use your package manager to install python3.

For Ubuntu, it is sudo apt install python3-dev

  • On Ubuntu 16, 18, 20 ,22 and 24 run:

    sudo apt install python-dev bzip2 xz-utils zlib1g libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libpopt0

  • On Debian and Debian-based distros run:

    sudo apt-get install python3-dev libbz2-1.0 xz-utils zlib1g libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libpopt0

  • On RPM-based distros run:

    sudo yum install python3.9-devel zlib bzip2-libs xz-libs libxml2-devel libxslt-devel libpopt0

  • On Fedora 22 and later run:

    sudo dnf install python3.9-devel xz-libs zlib libxml2-devel libxslt-devel bzip2-libs libpopt0

If these packages are not available from your package manager, you must compile them from sources.

MacOS

The default Python 3 provided with macOS is 3.9. Alternatively you can download and install Python 3.9 from https://www.python.org/

Windows

Download and install Python 3.9 from https://www.python.org/

Note

64-bit Python interpreters (x86-64) are the only interpreters supported by ScanCode on all operating systems which means only 64-bit Windows is supported.

See the Install ScanCode on Windows 10/11 section for more installation details.