Get the MAC address of remote hosts or network interfaces using Python.

It provides a platform-independant interface to get the MAC addresses of:

• System network interfaces (by interface name)
• Remote hosts (by IPv4/IPv6 address or hostname)

It provides one function: get_mac_address()

Features

• Pure-Python
• Supports Python 2.6+, 3.2+, pypy, and pypy3
• No dependencies
• Small size
• Can be used as an independant .py file
• Simple terminal tool (when installed as a package)

Usage

In Python

.. code-block:: python

from getmac import get_mac_address eth_mac = get_mac_address(interface="eth0") win_mac = get_mac_address(interface="Ethernet 3") ip_mac = get_mac_address(ip="192.168.0.1") ip6_mac = get_mac_address(ip6="::1") host_mac = get_mac_address(hostname="localhost") updated_mac = get_mac_address(ip="10.0.0.1", network_request=True)

Terminal

.. code-block:: bash

get-mac --interface 'eth0' get-mac --ip '192.168.0.1' get-mac --ip6 '::1'

Note: following will not work with python 2.6

python -m getmac --interface 'eth0' python -m getmac --ip '192.168.0.1'

get_mac_address()

• interface: Name of a network interface on the system.
• ip: IPv4 address of a remote host.
• ip6: IPv6 address of a remote host.
• hostname: Hostname of a remote host.
• network_request: If an network request (ping usually) should be made to update and populate the ARP table of remote hosts used to lookup MACs in most circumstances. Disable this if you want to just use what's already in the table, or if you have requirements to prevent network traffic.

Notes

• The first four arguments are mutually exclusive. network_request does not have any functionality when the interface argument is specified, and can be safely set if using in a script.
• If none of the arguments are selected, the default network interface for the system will be used.
• For the time being, it assumes you are using Ethernet.
• Exceptions will be handled silently and returned as a None. If you run into problems, create an issue on GitHub, or set DEBUG to true if you're brave.
• Messages are output using the warnings library. If you are using logging, they can be captured using logging.captureWarnings(). Otherwise, they can be suppressed using warnings.filterwarnings("ignore"). https://docs.python.org/3/library/warnings.html

Platforms

• Windows
  • Versions: 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8/8.1, 10
  • Commands: ipconfig, ping
  • Libraries: ctypes
• Linux
  • Distros: Debian, RHEL
  • Commands: arp, ip, ifconfig
  • Libraries: fcntl
• Mac OS X (Darwin)
  • Same linux/unix
• HP-UX:
  • lanscan
• Generic Unix-based
  • Commands: netstat, cat

Caveats & Known issues

Caveats

• Depending on the platform, there could be a performance detriment, due to heavy usage of regular expressions.
• Testing is only on a few platforms (Ubuntu 14+, Windows 10, OSX), so your mileage may vary. Please report any problems by opening a issue on GitHub!

Known Issues

• Hostnames for IPv6 devices are not yet supported.
• The "default" of selecting the default route interface for the platform currently attempts to use common default interfaces, not the actual default.

Sources

Many of the methods used to acquire an address and the core logic framework are attributed to the CPython project's UUID implementation. * https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/uuid.py * https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/2.7/Lib/uuid.py

Other sources are noted with inline comments at the appropriate sections.

TODO

• Cache results on regex-heavy functions (add a arg to disable this behavior)
• Decide on what the error behavior should be. Is returning None for both errors and simple failures to find acceptable?
• New platforms
  • Android
  • FreeBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • Solaris
  • Windows pre-2000

License

MIT. Feel free to copy, modify, and use to your heart's content. Have fun!