Based on the Bitcoin Electrum Lightweight wallet. See the Contributing section below. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done.
Electrum 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:
Due to the need for fast symmetric ciphers, cryptography is required. Install from your package manager (or from pip):
If you would like hardware wallet support, see this.
Running from tar.gz
If you downloaded the official package (tar.gz), you can run Electrum from its root directory without installing it on your system; all the pure python dependencies are included in the 'packages' directory. To run Electrum from its root directory, just do:
You can also install Electrum on your system, by running this command:
This will download and install the Python dependencies used by Electrum instead of using the 'packages' directory. It will also place an executable named electrum in ~/.local/bin, so make sure that is on your PATH variable.
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 or Discord first.
Besides GitHub, most communication about Electrum development happens on Discord, in the Fact0rnserver.