Installation

Pwntools is best supported on 64-bit Ubuntu LTS releases (14.04, 16.04, 18.04, and 20.04). Most functionality should work on any Posix-like distribution (Debian, Arch, FreeBSD, OSX, etc.).

Prerequisites

In order to get the most out of pwntools, you should have the following system libraries installed.

Note: For Mac OS X you will need to have cmake brew install cmake and pkg-config brew install pkg-config installed.

Released Version

pwntools is available as a pip package for both Python2 and Python3.

Python3

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-dev git libssl-dev libffi-dev build-essential
$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade pwntools

Python2 (Deprecated)

NOTE: Pwntools maintainers STRONGLY recommend using Python3 for all future Pwntools-based scripts and projects.

Additionally, due to pip dropping support for Python2, a specfic version of pip must be installed.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python python-pip python-dev git libssl-dev libffi-dev build-essential
$ python2 -m pip install --upgrade pip==20.3.4
$ python2 -m pip install --upgrade pwntools

Command-Line Tools

When installed with sudo the above commands will install Pwntools’ command-line tools to somewhere like /usr/bin.

However, if you run as an unprivileged user, you may see a warning message that looks like this:

WARNING: The scripts asm, checksec, common, constgrep, cyclic, debug, disablenx, disasm,
elfdiff, elfpatch, errno, hex, main, phd, pwn, pwnstrip, scramble, shellcraft, template,
unhex, update and version are installed in '/home/user/.local/bin' which is not on PATH.

Follow the instructions listed and add ~/.local/bin to your $PATH environment variable.

Development

If you are hacking on Pwntools locally, you’ll want to do something like this:

$ git clone https://github.com/Gallopsled/pwntools
$ pip install --upgrade --editable ./pwntools