Alternate host/IP for python script

Question

I want my Python script to access a URL through an IP specified in the script instead of through the default DNS for the domain. Basically I want the equivalent of adding an entry to my /etc/hosts file, but I want the change to apply only to my script instead of globally on the whole server. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use an explicit IP number to connect to a specific machine by embedding that into the URL: http://127.0.0.1/index.html is equivalent to http://localhost/index.html

That said, it isn't a good idea to use IP numbers instead of DNS entries. IPs change a lot more often than DNS entries, meaning your script has a greater chance of breaking if you hard-code the address instead of letting it resolve normally.

Answer 2

Whether this works or not will depend on whether the far end site is using HTTP/1.1 named-based virtual hosting or not.

If they're not, you can simply replace the hostname part of the URL with their IP address, per @Greg's answer.

If they are, however, you have to ensure that the correct Host: header is sent as part of the HTTP request. Without that, a virtual hosting web server won't know which site's content to give you. Refer to your HTTP client API (Curl?) to see if you can add or change default request headers.