Electrum - Lightweight Bitcoin client

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

Getting started

Electrum is a pure python application. However, if you want to use the Qt interface, then you need to install the Qt dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python-qt4

If you downloaded the official package (tar.gz), then 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

If you cloned the git repository, then 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):

python setup.py install

Compile the icons file for Qt:

sudo apt-get install pyqt4-dev-tools
pyrcc4 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:

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

Install on Linux systems

If you install Electrum on your system, you can run it from any directory.

If you have pip, you can do:

python setup.py sdist
sudo pip install --pre dist/Electrum-2.0.tar.gz

If you don't have pip, install with:

python setup.py sdist
sudo python setup.py install

Creating Binaries

In order to create binaries, you must create the 'packages' directory:

./contrib/make_packages

This directory contains the python dependencies used by Electrum.

Mac OS X

# On MacPorts installs:
sudo python setup-release.py py2app

# On Homebrew installs:
ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" sudo python setup-release.py py2app --includes sip

sudo hdiutil create -fs HFS+ -volname "Electrum" -srcfolder dist/Electrum.app dist/electrum-VERSION-macosx.dmg

Windows

See contrib/build-wine/README file.

Android

See gui/kivy/Readme.txt file.