IDAPython began life as a third-party IDA plug-in developed by Gergely Erdelyi and is covered more thoroughly in Chapter 15. Its popularity among IDA users spread rapidly, and since IDA 5.4, IDAPython has shipped as a standard plug-in with all versions of IDA. Nonetheless, IDAPython remains available as an open source project that you may download and modify to suit your needs.

Instructions for building IDAPython are available in the file BUILDING.txt contained in the IDAPython source, while instructions for installation are available on the IDAPython website. If you elect to build IDAPython from source, a number of dependencies must be satisfied. First and foremost is the need to have a working installation of 32-bit Python. Windows and OS X users are recommended to obtain and install Python using one of the installers available at the Python website.^[206] Linux users can generally get by with the 32-bit version of Python available for their flavor of Linux. Note that as of this writing, IDAPython is not compatible with Python version 3.x.

The Python build script supplied with IDAPython, build.py, makes use of the Simplified Wrapper Interface Generator (SWIG)^[207] to generate the components required to interface Python to IDA’s C++ libraries, and the header files that ship with the IDA SDK (since version 5.4) contain a number of macro declarations to ensure that they are compatible with SWIG. In addition to SWIG, the build process requires a C++ compiler. For Windows builds, the build script is configured to use Microsoft Visual C++,^[208] while for Linux and Mac builds, the build process utilizes g++.