Install abicheck¶

Full installation (recommended) — conda-forge bundles abicheck with castxml and a compatible compiler toolchain, so header AST analysis (L2) works immediately:

conda create -n abicheck -c conda-forge python=3.12 abicheck
conda activate abicheck

No extra manual dependency installation is required when using the conda-forge package.

Lightweight/core installation — the PyPI package is pure Python with no native scanner dependency:

pip install abicheck

Requirements¶

Python 3.10+
castxml + a C/C++ compiler — required for header AST analysis (all platforms)

All Python dependencies (pyelftools, pefile, macholib) come with the abicheck install.

Important: pip install abicheck does not install castxml. Any command that takes headers (--header / -H) needs castxml on your PATH — without it those commands fail with castxml not found. Install it with the system/conda packages below (the conda-forge package pulls it in automatically). If you have no castxml, run binary-only mode by omitting the header flags — abicheck falls back to DWARF/symbols analysis (weaker, but works). Don't run pip install castxml to fill the gap: that installs the unmaintained legacy PyPI distribution (last released 0.4.5 in 2018), which abicheck's version gate rejects by default for an authoritative L2 scan — use one of the options below (conda-forge, the pinned Superbuild, or your platform's package manager) instead.

Option A: conda-forge (recommended)¶

Conda-forge supplies CastXML together with a compatible compiler toolchain:

conda install -c conda-forge castxml

Option B: pinned CastXML Superbuild (Ubuntu CI/reproducers)¶

Ubuntu 24.04's apt package currently bundles Clang 17, which cannot parse some GCC 13 libstdc++ headers. For reproducible Ubuntu runs, use a CastXML Superbuild release, pin its tag and SHA256, extract it to a versioned directory, and prepend its bin directory to PATH. The abicheck GitHub Action does this automatically. The current CI pin is v2026.01.30 (bundled Clang 21.1.8).

# macOS
brew install castxml
# plus Xcode Command Line Tools for clang

# Windows (PowerShell, as administrator)
choco install castxml
# plus MSVC Build Tools (cl.exe) for PE/PDB debug-info analysis

Option C: conda-forge abicheck environment¶

Already covered by the Full installation command at the top of this page (conda create -n abicheck -c conda-forge python=3.12 abicheck) — listed here too since it's also a valid answer to "how do I get castxml" if you already have abicheck installed a different way and are switching.

Install from source¶

git clone https://github.com/abicheck/abicheck.git
cd abicheck
pip install -e .

Next¶

➡️ Run your first check