libpcap-ffi - libpcap FFI wrapper for Node.js

Supports Windows, macOS and Linux.

This project was made possible thanks to koffi, an awesome and fast C FFI module for Node.js.

Since koffi is made for Node.js, compatibility with Bun or Deno is not guaranteed but could be possible.

Prerequisites

Windows

You'll need to install Npcap.

Check that you have the wpcap.dll file at C:\Windows\System32\Npcap\wpcap.dll - should be the default location.

Note that libpcap-ffi may not be compatible with WinPcap so if you had WinPcap installed before, you'll need to uninstall it or find a way to use the wpcap.dll from Npcap instead of the one from WinPcap.

macOS

You need to have libpcap.dylib installed on your system.

It's apparently already installed on macOS, but if it's not, you can install it using Homebrew:

brew install libpcap

Linux

You need to have libpcap.so installed on your system.

Usage

Every functions can be directly imported from libpcap-ffi, so if you want to use findAllDevs, you can simply do:

// ESM
import { findAllDevs } from "libpcap-ffi";
// CJS
const { findAllDevs } = require("libpcap-ffi");

// Just use it !
const devices = await findAllDevs();
console.log(devices);
/** >>> Returns the following array:
 * [
 *   {
 *     name: '\\Device\\...',
 *     description: '...',
 *     addresses: [ ... ],
 *     flags: 22
 *   },
 *   ...
 * ]
 */

Contributing

Commands

Note that we use pnpm to manage dependencies.

Command	Description
pnpm install	Install the dependencies
pnpm build	Bundle src directory into dist

Run examples

You should install globally tsx.

npm i -g tsx
# Now you can run the examples.
tsx ./examples/devices.ts

TO-DO

A list of things to do to make the library more complete.

• pcap_open_live (work in progress)
• pcap_datalink
• pcap_loop
• pcap_close