Welcome to Async Host discovery’s documentation!¶

Async Host discovery¶

Discover hosts by arp and ptr lookup

Features¶

Discover hosts on the network via ARP and PTR lookup

Quick Start¶

import asyncio
import pprint
from aiodiscover import DiscoverHosts


async def main() -> None:
    async with DiscoverHosts() as discover_hosts:
        pprint.pprint(await discover_hosts.async_discover())


asyncio.run(main())

For long-lived consumers, reuse a single DiscoverHosts instance across scans and call await discover_hosts.close() at shutdown to release the underlying DNS resolver and netlink socket.

Picking a specific interface¶

On hosts with more than one network interface, pass local_ip to pin discovery to the subnet of a chosen interface instead of letting the default route decide:

async with DiscoverHosts(local_ip="192.168.5.10") as discover_hosts:
    await discover_hosts.async_discover()

local_ip is the IPv4 address bound to the interface you want to scan on. Without it, aiodiscover infers the subnet from whichever interface provides a route to a well-known target. Invalid IPv4 input raises ValueError at construction time instead of silently auto-detecting, so misconfiguration surfaces immediately rather than scanning the wrong subnet.

Command-line usage¶

Installing aiodiscover exposes an aiodiscover console script (also runnable as python -m aiodiscover) that scans the local network and prints the discovered hosts.

$ aiodiscover
Hostname  IP           MAC
--------  -----------  -----------------
router    192.168.1.1  aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
laptop    192.168.1.2  11:22:33:44:55:66

$ aiodiscover --json
[
  {"hostname": "router", "ip": "192.168.1.1", "macaddress": "aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff"},
  {"hostname": "laptop", "ip": "192.168.1.2", "macaddress": "11:22:33:44:55:66"}
]

Rows are sorted by IP. Peer-supplied hostname / MAC / IP values are stripped of non-printable characters before display, so a hostile DHCP / DNS responder on the LAN can’t inject ANSI escapes or control bytes into the terminal.

Common flags:

--format {table,json,pprint} — pick output format (default table).
--json — shortcut for --format json. Pair with --indent N to control JSON indentation.
-v / --debug — bump logging verbosity (shortcuts for --log-level INFO / DEBUG).
--recurse — allow recursive PTR queries (the default --no-recurse keeps queries from being forwarded to upstream public resolvers).
--local-ip IP — pin discovery to the subnet of IP (the IPv4 address of the interface to use). Useful when the default route doesn’t point at the network you want to scan.
--version — print the installed version and exit.

Run aiodiscover --help for the full reference.

Installation¶

Stable Release: pip install aiodiscover
Development Head: pip install git+https://github.com/bluetooth-devices/aiodiscover.git

Documentation¶

For full package documentation please visit aiodiscover.readthedocs.io.

Development¶

See CONTRIBUTING.md for information related to developing the code.

The Four Commands You Need To Know¶

pip install -e .[dev]

This will install your package in editable mode with all the required development dependencies (i.e. tox).
make build

This will run tox which will run all your tests in both Python 3.7 and Python 3.8 as well as linting your code.
make clean

This will clean up various Python and build generated files so that you can ensure that you are working in a clean environment.
make docs

This will generate and launch a web browser to view the most up-to-date documentation for your Python package.

Additional Optional Setup Steps:¶

Turn your project into a GitHub repository:
- Make an account on github.com
- Go to make a new repository
- Recommendations:
  - It is strongly recommended to make the repository name the same as the Python package name
  - A lot of the following optional steps are free if the repository is Public, plus open source is cool
- After a GitHub repo has been created, run the commands listed under: “…or push an existing repository from the command line”
Register your project with Codecov:
- Make an account on codecov.io(Recommended to sign in with GitHub) everything else will be handled for you.
Ensure that you have set GitHub pages to build the gh-pages branch by selecting the gh-pages branch in the dropdown in the “GitHub Pages” section of the repository settings. (Repo Settings)
Register your project with PyPI:
- Make an account on pypi.org
- Go to your GitHub repository’s settings and under the Secrets tab, add a secret called PYPI_TOKEN with your password for your PyPI account. Don’t worry, no one will see this password because it will be encrypted.
- Next time you push to the branch main after using bump2version, GitHub actions will build and deploy your Python package to PyPI.

Suggested Git Branch Strategy¶

main is for the most up-to-date development, very rarely should you directly commit to this branch. GitHub Actions will run on every push and on a CRON to this branch but still recommended to commit to your development branches and make pull requests to main. If you push a tagged commit with bumpversion, this will also release to PyPI.
Your day-to-day work should exist on branches separate from main. Even if it is just yourself working on the repository, make a PR from your working branch to main so that you can ensure your commits don’t break the development head. GitHub Actions will run on every push to any branch or any pull request from any branch to any other branch.
It is recommended to use “Squash and Merge” commits when committing PR’s. It makes each set of changes to main atomic and as a side effect naturally encourages small well defined PR’s.

Apache Software License 2.0