Any system which supports a basic PERL installation should allow Nikto to run. It has been extensively tested on:

The only required PERL module that does not come standard is LibWhisker. Nikto comes with and is configured to use a local LW.pm file (in the plugins directory), but users may wish to change Nikto to use a version installed on the system. See Section 2 for further information.

For SSL support the Net::SSLeay PERL module must be installed (which in turn requires OpenSSL on the Unix platform). Windows support for SSL is dependent on the installation package, but is rumored to exist for ActiveState's Perl.

The nmap scanner can also be used, if desired. In some cases using nmap will slow down Nikto execution, as it must call an external program. For scanning many ports across one or more servers, using nmap will be faster than using Nikto's internal PERL scanning.