Use your system's amavis package if possible.

Prerequisites

Software dependencies are tracked via Dist::Zilla. Some of them involve non-perl development libraries and GCC as a build dependency if obtained from CPAN:

• libdb
• libidn2
• libssl
• libzmq3

On Debian 13 for example, one can install them via

apt-get install build-essential libdist-zilla-perl libdb-dev libidn2-dev libssl-dev libzmq3-dev

Obtaining the software

Choose a version, fetch the tarball and unpack it:

VERSION=master
curl -O https://gitlab.com/amavis/amavis/-/archive/$VERSION/amavis-$VERSION.tar.gz
gzip -d -c amavis-$VERSION.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd amavis-$VERSION

Privileged installation

• Run dzil install.
• Prepare a configuration file, owned by root, possibly based on conf/amavisd.conf.
• Prepare a dedicated user, e.g. vscan.
• Create directories for $MYHOME, $db_home and $TEMPBASE.
• Run sa-update.
• Run amavisd -c /path/to/amavis.conf debug

Unprivileged installation

A purely unprivileged mode of operation and bootstrapping is not supported. In the end, the config file needs to be owned by root.

Moreover, perl's taint mode prohibits externally defined non-standard library paths, so running amavis from a local perl environment via local::lib will not work without code modifications.