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

Question

dnspython (http:/www.dnspython.org) 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 fallback to dns lookups otherwise?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

The normal name resolution in Python works fine. Why do you need DNSpython for that. Just use socket's getaddrinfo which follows the rules configured for your operating system (on Debian, it follows /etc/nsswitch.conf:

>>> print socket.getaddrinfo('google.com', 80)
[(10, 1, 6, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::63', 80, 0, 0)), (10, 2, 17, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::63', 80, 0, 0)), (10, 3, 0, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::63', 80, 0, 0)), (10, 1, 6, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::68', 80, 0, 0)), (10, 2, 17, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::68', 80, 0, 0)), (10, 3, 0, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::68', 80, 0, 0)), (10, 1, 6, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::93', 80, 0, 0)), (10, 2, 17, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::93', 80, 0, 0)), (10, 3, 0, '', ('2a00:1450:8006::93', 80, 0, 0)), (2, 1, 6, '', ('209.85.229.104', 80)), (2, 2, 17, '', ('209.85.229.104', 80)), (2, 3, 0, '', ('209.85.229.104', 80)), (2, 1, 6, '', ('209.85.229.99', 80)), (2, 2, 17, '', ('209.85.229.99', 80)), (2, 3, 0, '', ('209.85.229.99', 80)), (2, 1, 6, '', ('209.85.229.147', 80)), (2, 2, 17, '', ('209.85.229.147', 80)), (2, 3, 0, '', ('209.85.229.147', 80))]