ABOUT

This service/library publishes CNAME records pointing to the local host over multicast DNS using the Avahi daemon found in all major Linux distributions. Useful as a poor-man’s service discovery or as a helper for named virtual-hosts in development environments.

Since Avahi is compatible with Apple’s Bonjour, these names are usable from MacOS X and Windows too.

See also:

• http://www.multicastdns.org

• https://www.avahi.org

• https://www.apple.com/support/bonjour

DEPENDENCIES

Besides a running Avahi daemon, this service requires the dbus-python bindings which, in turn, requires the development packages for D-Bus and D-Bus Glib (eg. dbus-devel and dbus-glib-devel in CentOS 7).

INSTALLATION

This package can be installed from source by running:

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

Or, you can install the latest stable release from PyPI:

pip install mdns-publisher

Note: If you’re using Python 2.7 and you get errors installing dbus-python, you may need to upgrade your pip version:

pip install --upgrade pip

RUNNING

Pass (one or more) CNAMEs as command-line arguments to mdns-publish-cname:

mdns-publish-cname name01.local name02.local

Names must use the .local domain but can have arbitrary sub-domains:

mdns-publish-cname name01.local name02.local name03.mysubdomain.local

If the server running mdns-publish-cname is being announced over mDNS as myserver.local, all of these names will be answered by Avahi as CNAMEs for myserver.local, regardless of any sub-domains they might have. They remain available as long as mdns-publish-cname is running.

Run mdns-publish-cname with no arguments to find out about the available options.

Note: You can find a sample mdns-publish-cname.service file for systemd in the source repository.

INTEGRATING

The AvahiPublisher class in the mpublisher module can be integrated into your application to have it publish its own CNAMEs.