Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin client

Licence: MIT Licence
Author: Thomas Voegtlin
Language: Python
Homepage: https://electrum.org/

Getting started

Electrum is a pure python application. If you want to use the Qt interface, install the Qt dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt5

If you downloaded the official package (tar.gz), you can run Electrum from its root directory, without installing it on your system; all the python dependencies are included in the 'packages' directory. To run Electrum from its root directory, just do:

./electrum

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

sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools
pip3 install .[full]

This will download and install the Python dependencies used by Electrum, instead of using the 'packages' directory. The 'full' extra contains some optional dependencies that we think are often useful but they are not strictly needed.

If you cloned the git repository, you need to compile extra files before you can run Electrum. Read the next section, "Development Version".

Development version

Check out the code from GitHub:

git clone git://github.com/spesmilo/electrum.git
cd electrum

Run install (this should install dependencies):

pip3 install .[full]

Compile the icons file for Qt:

sudo apt-get install pyqt5-dev-tools
pyrcc5 icons.qrc -o gui/qt/icons_rc.py

Compile the protobuf description file:

sudo apt-get install protobuf-compiler
protoc --proto_path=lib/ --python_out=lib/ lib/paymentrequest.proto

Create translations (optional):

sudo apt-get install python-requests gettext
./contrib/make_locale

Creating Binaries

To create binaries, create the 'packages' directory:

./contrib/make_packages

This directory contains the python dependencies used by Electrum.

Mac OS X / macOS

See contrib/build-osx/.

Windows

See contrib/build-wine/.

Android

See gui/kivy/Readme.txt file.