Licence: MIT Licence
Author: Litecoin Foundation
Language: Python (>= 3.10)
Homepage: https://electrum-ltc.org/
(If you've come here looking to simply run Electrum-LTC, you may download it here.)
Electrum-LTC itself is pure Python, and so are most of the required dependencies, but not everything. The following sections describe how to run from source, but here is a TL;DR:
First, install uv if you have not already:
$ curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
Restart your shell if the uv command is not immediately available.
$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-dev
$ uv venv
$ ELECTRUM_ECC_DONT_COMPILE=1 uv pip install ".[gui,crypto]"
$ uv run ./run_electrum
If you want to use the Qt interface, install the Qt dependencies:
$ uv pip install PyQt6
For elliptic curve operations, libsecp256k1 is a required dependency.
If you "pip install" Electrum-LTC, by default libsecp will get compiled locally,
as part of the electrum-ecc dependency. This can be opted-out of,
by setting the ELECTRUM_ECC_DONT_COMPILE=1 environment variable.
For the compilation to work, besides a C compiler, you need at least:
$ sudo apt-get install automake libtool
If you opt out of the compilation, you need to provide libsecp in another way, e.g.:
$ sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-dev
Due to the need for fast symmetric ciphers, cryptography is required. Install from your package manager (or from pip):
$ uv pip install cryptography
For fast blockchain verification, scrypt is required. Install from your package manager (or from pip):
$ uv pip install scrypt
If you would like hardware wallet support, see this.
If you downloaded the official package (tar.gz), you can run Electrum-LTC from its root directory without installing it on your system; all the pure python dependencies are included in the 'packages' directory. To run Electrum-LTC from its root directory, just do:
$ ./run_electrum
You can also install Electrum-LTC into a virtual environment:
$ uv venv
$ uv pip install .
$ uv run electrum-ltc
This will download and install the Python dependencies used by
Electrum-LTC instead of using the 'packages' directory.
It will also place an executable named electrum-ltc in .venv/bin.
(For OS-specific instructions, see here for Windows, and for macOS)
Check out the code from GitHub:
$ git clone https://github.com/litecoin-foundation/electrum-ltc.git
$ cd electrum-ltc
$ git submodule update --init
Run install (this should install dependencies):
$ uv venv
$ uv pip install -e ".[gui,crypto]"
Create translations (optional):
$ sudo apt-get install gettext
$ ./contrib/locale/build_locale.sh electrum/locale/locale electrum/locale/locale
Finally, to start Electrum:
$ uv run ./run_electrum
Run unit tests with pytest:
$ uv pip install -r contrib/requirements/requirements-ci.txt
$ uv pip install -e ".[tests,qml_gui]"
$ uv run python -m pytest tests -v
(can be parallelized with -n auto option, using pytest-xdist plugin)
To run a single file, specify it directly like this:
$ uv run python -m pytest tests/test_bitcoin.py -v
Any help testing the software, reporting or fixing bugs, reviewing pull requests and recent changes, writing tests, or helping with outstanding issues is very welcome. Implementing new features, or improving/refactoring the codebase, is of course also welcome, but to avoid wasted effort, especially for larger changes, we encourage discussing these on the issue tracker first.
Please improve translations on Crowdin.
Electrum-LTC is based on Electrum, created by Thomas Voegtlin. Available under the MIT License.