How can I do DNS lookups in Python, including referring to /etc/hosts?

python dns
Toby White picture Toby White · May 10, 2010 · Viewed 142.9k times · Source

dnspython will do my DNS lookups very nicely, but it entirely ignores the contents of /etc/hosts.

Is there a python library call which will do the right thing? ie check first in etc/hosts, and only fall back to DNS lookups otherwise?

Answer

Jochen Ritzel picture Jochen Ritzel · May 10, 2010

I'm not really sure if you want to do DNS lookups yourself or if you just want a host's ip. In case you want the latter,

import socket
print(socket.gethostbyname('localhost')) # result from hosts file
print(socket.gethostbyname('google.com')) # your os sends out a dns query

Related questions

Python lookup hostname from IP with 1 second timeout

How can I look up a hostname given an IP address? Furthermore, how can I specify a timeout in case no such reverse DNS entry exists? Trying to keep things as fast as possible. Or is there a better way? …

Read More
How to extract top-level domain name (TLD) from URL

how would you extract the domain name from a URL, excluding any subdomains? My initial simplistic attempt was: '.'.join(urlparse.urlparse(url).netloc.split('.')[-2:]) This works for http://www.foo.com, but not http://www.…

Read More
Set specific DNS server using dns.resolver (pythondns)

I am using dns.resolver from dnspython. Is it possible to set the IP address of the server to use for queries ?

Read More