GitPedia

Libmodbus

A Modbus library for Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD and Windows

From stephane·Updated June 18, 2026·View on GitHub·

libmodbus is a free software library to send/receive data with a device which respects the Modbus protocol. This library can use a serial port or an Ethernet connection. The project is written primarily in C, distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 license, first published in 2010. It has gained significant community traction with 4,178 stars and 1,930 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: automation, c, libmodbus, modbus.

Latest release: v3.1.12
February 13, 2026View Changelog →

A groovy modbus library

Build Status
Coverity Scan Build Status

Overview

libmodbus is a free software library to send/receive data with a device which
respects the Modbus protocol. This library can use a serial port or an Ethernet
connection.

The functions included in the library have been derived from the Modicon Modbus
Protocol Reference Guide which can be obtained from www.modbus.org.

The license of libmodbus is LGPL v2.1 or later.

The official website is www.libmodbus.org. The
website contains the latest version of the documentation.

The library is written in C and designed to run on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Embox,
QNX and Windows.

You can use the library on MCUs with Embox RTOS.

Installation

You will only need to install automake, autoconf, libtool and a C compiler (gcc
or clang) to compile the library and asciidoc and xmlto to generate the
documentation (optional).

To install, just run the usual dance, ./configure && make install. Run
./autogen.sh first to generate the configure script if required.

You can change installation directory with prefix option, eg. ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/. You have to check that the installation library path is
properly set up on your system (/etc/ld.so.conf.d) and library cache is up to
date (run ldconfig as root if required).

The library provides a libmodbus.pc file to use with pkg-config to ease your
program compilation and linking.

If you want to compile with Microsoft Visual Studio, you should follow the
instructions in ./src/win32/README.md.

To compile under Windows, install MinGW and MSYS then
select the common packages (gcc, automake, libtool, etc). The directory
./src/win32/ contains a Visual C project.

To compile under OS X with homebrew, you
will need to install the following dependencies first: brew install autoconf automake libtool.

To build under Embox, you have to use its build system.

Testing

Some tests are provided in tests directory, you can freely edit the source
code to fit your needs (it's Free Software :).

See tests/README for a description of each program.

For a quick test of libmodbus, you can run the following programs in two shells:

  1. ./unit-test-server
  2. ./unit-test-client

By default, all TCP unit tests will be executed (see --help for options).

It's also possible to run the unit tests with make check.

To report a bug or to contribute

See CONTRIBUTING document.

By contributing to libmodbus, you agree to the Contributor License Agreement.

Documentation

You can serve the local documentation with:

shell
pip install mkdocs-material mkdocs serve

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from stephane/libmodbus via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/19/2026