from GitHub releases 

You can download the latest version of Sniffnet through the installers available below.
Choose from a Windows Installer, an Apple Disk Image, a DEB package, or an RPM package (depending on your operating system).

Note

If you are unsure which package to download, you should probably choose the first from your operating system list.

• 64-bit | 32-bit

• Intel | Apple silicon

• deb: amd64 | arm64 | i386 | armhf

• rpm: x86_64 | aarch64

from Crates.io 

Follow this method only if you have Rust installed on your machine.
In this case, the application binary can be built and installed with:

cargo install sniffnet

You can install Sniffnet Homebrew package with:

brew install sniffnet

You can install Sniffnet Nix package adding the following Nix code to your NixOS Configuration, usually located in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

environment.systemPackages = [
  pkgs.sniffnet
];

Alternatively, you can install it in your home using Home Manager with:

home.packages = [
  pkgs.sniffnet
];

Alternatively, you can try it in a shell with:

nix-shell -p sniffnet

You can install Sniffnet community package via pacman:

pacman -S sniffnet

You can install Sniffnet port with:

pkg install sniffnet

You can install Sniffnet from the official repositories via pkgin:

pkgin install sniffnet

You can install Sniffnet from the official repository with:

tce-load -wi sniffnet

Windows dependencies 

In order to correctly build and run Sniffnet on Windows systems you need to:

• Install Npcap, making sure to check the box Install Npcap in WinPcap API-compatible Mode during the installation.

• Download the Npcap SDK.

• Add the SDK's /Lib/x64 (or /Lib) folder to your LIB environment variable.

Note

If you just need to run the app, perform only the first step (second and third steps are required only for the build).

Linux dependencies 

• On Debian-based distributions:
  • libpcap-dev
  • libasound2-dev
  • libfontconfig1-dev
• On RPM-based distributions:
  • libpcap-devel
  • alsa-lib-devel
  • fontconfig-devel

Note

If you just need to run the app, the -dev / -devel part of the dependencies is not needed (it's required only for the build).

Note that if you are not running as root, you need to set capabilities to inspect a network adapter:

sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip <your/Sniffnet/executable/path>

Alternatively you can run the app with sudo privileges:

sudo sniffnet

MacOS dependencies 

MacOS natively has all the dependencies you need to build and run Sniffnet!
However, remember to run the app with administrator privileges: this is needed to analyse the activity of your network device.

Geolocation and network providers (ASN) refer to the remote IP address of each connection. They are retrieved performing lookups against MMDB files:

Note

The MMDB (MaxMind database) format has been developed especially for IP lookup.
It is optimized to perform lookups on data indexed by IP network ranges quickly and efficiently.
It permits the best performance on IP lookups, and it's suitable for use in a production environment.

This product includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from https://www.maxmind.com

This file format potentially allows Sniffnet to execute hundreds of different IP lookups in a matter of a few milliseconds.

Application layer protocols are inferred from the transport port numbers, following the convention maintained by IANA.

Please, remember that this is just a convention:

Warning

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for maintaining the official assignments of port numbers for specific uses.
However, many unofficial uses of well-known port numbers occur in practice.

The following table reports the port-to-service mappings used by Sniffnet, chosen from the most common assignments by IANA.

Some keyboard shortcuts are available to improve the efficiency of use and the overall user experience.

If you want to suggest a different key combination for one of the existing shortcuts or if you want to propose a new shortcut, have a look at this issue.

The currently usable hotkeys are reported in the following.

Note

On macOS, use the cmd key instead of ctrl

Custom themes are specified as a TOML file.

The TOML must follow this format:

# all colors are in RGB/RGBA hexadecimal.
primary = "#303446"           # background color
secondary = "#a6d189"         # header, footer, and incoming connections color
outgoing = "#f4b8e4"          # outgoing connections color
text_body = "#c6d0f5"         # body text color 
text_headers = "#232634"      # header and footer text color
starred = "#e5c890aa"         # favorites' star color

The example theme above uses colors from Catppuccin.

You can also check the resources/themes folder, which contains sample TOML files with additional themes.

To use a custom theme for your instance of Sniffnet, specify the path of your TOML file in the application's settings (at the bottom of the style tab).

Most of the errors that can occur are likely due to your system missing required pcap dependencies, necessary to correctly analyze a network adapter.
Check the required dependencies section for instructions on how to proceed, depending on your operating system.

In some circumstances, especially if you are running on an old architecture or your graphical drivers are not up-to-date, the wgpu default renderer used by iced may cause problems (country icons are completely black, or the interface glitches).
In these cases you can download an alternative version of the application, which is based on tiny-skia, a CPU-only software renderer that should work properly on every environment:
Windows | macOS | Linux DEB | Linux RPM