Ushark is a native module which brings the Wireshark dissection to Nodejs apps.

Internally ushark uses the unofficial Wireshark API and it's linked against its static libraries.

Using ushark

Ushark currently supports:

• linux x64 - built for Ubuntu 22.04
• darwin arm64 - built for macOS 12
• darwin x64 - built for macOS 13

The ushark module can be installed as a normal node module. node-pre-gyp-github installs the pre-built binaries for the specific OS and architecture. To build and run on unsupported platforms, see "Building the Wireshark libs" and "Building the binary module" below.

You can run node pcap_example.js to see the native module in action.

Code structure

• The libushark folder contains the usark C API and can be used to build native programs (see libushark/pcap_example.c).
• The Nodejs module interface is implemented in the bindings folder via the node-addon-api.
• The pcap_example.js shows how to use the ushark API from a Nodejs script.

Ushark depends on some Wireshark static libraries. The exposed functions are not part of an official API, so they may change in future Wireshark releases.

Building the Wireshark libs

First of all, set up the environment as described here.

On Ubuntu 22.04, you will need at least the following packages:

apt install build-essential cmake flex libglib2.0-dev libgnutls28-dev libgcrypt20-dev\
  libpcre2-dev zlib1g-dev libbrotli-dev libzstd-dev libgpg-error-dev liblz4-dev\
  libnghttp2-dev libc-ares-dev libsnappy-dev libpcap-dev

On macOS, you can run tools/macos-setup.sh to install all the dependencies (NOTE: comment install_minizip or build will fail).

To build the static libraries, run:

# The wireshark source should be cloned at ../wireshark
cd ..
git clone https://github.com/wireshark/wireshark

cd wireshark
git checkout 85a9e05c

# Disable any additional feature, we will manually enable what we need
# On macOs, replace "-i" with "-i '' -e"
sed -E -i 's/option\(BUILD_(.*) ON\)/option\(BUILD_\1 OFF\)/g' CMakeOptions.txt
sed -E -i 's/option\(ENABLE_(.*) ON\)/option\(ENABLE_\1 OFF\)/g' CMakeOptions.txt

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DENABLE_STATIC=ON -DENABLE_WERROR=ON\
	-DENABLE_ZLIB=ON -DENABLE_LZ4=ON -DENABLE_BROTLI=ON -DENABLE_ZSTD=ON\
	-DENABLE_NGHTTP2=ON -DENABLE_GNUTLS=ON -DBUILD_tshark=ON ..

make -j$(nproc) tshark

The built Wireshark static libraries will be located in build/run.

Building the binary module

After building the wireshark static libraries, the binary node module can be built with:

npm install --build-from-source

(optional) To build the tar.gz containing the binary module for the release, run:

make package

NOTE: on Ubuntu 22.04, use node 19 for packaging, to avoid adding a runtime reference to libnode:

install nvm and node 19
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.2/install.sh | bash
source ~/.bashrc
nvm install 19
nvm use 19