# Wireshark (open-source developer tool)

> Wireshark is a free, open-source developer tool for Windows, macOS and Linux. Wireshark is a network protocol analyser that captures live traffic or opens capture files and decodes it packet by packet. It has 10,107 GitHub stars and is released under the GPL-2.0 license.

Wireshark is a network traffic analyzer, or "sniffer", for Linux, macOS, \*BSD and other Unix and Unix-like operating systems and for Windows. It uses Qt, a graphical user interface library, and libpcap and npcap as packet capture and filtering libraries.

## Key facts

| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Repository | https://github.com/wireshark/wireshark |
| Platforms | Linux, macOS, Windows |
| Interface | desktop GUI |
| GitHub stars | 10,107 |
| License | GPL-2.0 (open source) |
| Replaces | n/a |
| Language | C |
| Website | https://www.wireshark.org |
| Official | yes (published by the project behind the app) |
| Category | Code editors & developer tools |
| Latest release | none on GitHub |
| Last commit | Oct 28, 2026 |

## Install

Download a build for your system from the project's releases (https://github.com/wireshark/wireshark/releases) or website, or build it from source by following the README.

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