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

dns, python

Solution

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,

/!\ socket.gethostbyname is deprecated, prefer socket.getaddrinfo

from `man gethostbyname`:

The gethostbyname*(), gethostbyaddr*(), [...] functions are obsolete. Applications should use getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3),

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

Problem

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?

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