Clamby Logo

This gem depends on the clamscan and freshclam daemons to be installed already.

If you have a file upload on your site and you do not scan the files for viruses then you not only compromise your software, but also the users of the software and their files. This gem's function is to simply scan a given file.

Usage

Be sure to check the CHANGELOG as recent changes may affect functionality.

Just add gem 'clamby' to your Gemfile and run bundle install.

You can use two methods to scan a file for a virus:

If you use safe? to scan a file, it will return true if no viruses were found, false if a virus was found, and nil if there was a problem finding the file or if there was a problem using clamscan

safe?(path_to_file)

If you use virus? to scan a file, it will return true if a virus was found, false if no virus was found, and nil if there was a problem finding the file or if there was a problem using clamscan

virus?(path_to_file)

In your model with the uploader, you can add the scanner to a before method to scan the file. When a file is scanned, a successful scan will return true. An unsuccessful scan will return false. A scan may be unsuccessful for a number of reasons; clamscan could not be found, clamscan returned a virus, or the file which you were trying to scan could not be found.

  before_create :scan_for_viruses

  private

  def scan_for_viruses
      path = self.attribute.url
      Clamby.safe?(path)
  end

Updating Definitions

I have done little testing with updating definitions online. However, there is a method that you can call Clamby.update which will execute freshclam. It is recommended that you follow the instructions below to ensure that this is done automatically on a daily/weekly basis.

Viruses Detected

It's good to note that Clamby will not by default delete files which had a virus. Instead, this is left to you to decide what should occur with that file. Below is an example where if a scan came back false, the file would be deleted.

  before_create :scan_for_viruses

  private

  def scan_for_viruses
      path = self.attribute.url
      scan_result = Clamby.safe?(path)
      if scan_result
        return true
      else
        File.delete(path)
        return false
      end
  end

Configuration

Configuration is rather limited right now. You can exclude the check if clamscan exists which will save a bunch of time for scanning your files. However, for development purposes, your machine may not have clamscan installed and you may wonder why it's not working properly. This is just to give you a reminder to install clamscan on your development machine and production machine. You can add the following to a config file, clamby_setup.rb to your initializers directory.

There has been added additional functionality where you can override exceptions. If you set the exceptions below to false, then there will not be a hard exception generated. Instead, it will post to your log that an error had occured. By default each one of these configuration options are set to true. You may want to set these to false in your production environment.

    Clamby.configure({
      :check => false,
      :error_clamscan_missing => false,
      :error_file_missing => false,
      :error_file_virus => false
    })

Dependencies

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install clamav

Apple

brew install clamav

Auto Update*

To update the virus database, open a terminal and enter the following command:

sudo freshclam

To automate this update you can set up a cron job. I'll show how to update the virus database every day at 8:57 PM.

You need to modify the crontab for the root user.

sudo crontab -e

This opens the root crontab file in a text editor. Add the following line

57 08 * * * sudo freshclam

LICENSE

MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

ClamAV is licensed under GNU GPL. The ClamAV software is NOT distributed nor modified with this gem.