netifaces (2)

1. What is this?

The original netifaces was abandonned by it's maintainer, leaving us without the option to get network addresses of any kind in Python. Unfortunately, the original sources are more akin to arcane magic, so picking where it's been left off is a difficult task.

I decided to rewrite netifaces, keeping the almost exact same API and adding the following:

• Support for future python versions
• Type annotations
• Maybe a more "queriable" API in the future

This project aims to be a drop-in replacement for those project who use netifaces, but I do not guarantee anything.

1.1 What is not working right-now

• The gateways API is only working if your system has a /proc/net/route file or the ip tool
• The windows gateways API is non-functional

2. Usage

For now the API is the same as the original netifaces, so please refer to it.

Install:

pip install netifaces2

Import:

>>> import netifaces
>>> netifaces.interfaces()  
    ...
>>> netifaces.ifaddresses('en0')
    ...
>>> netifacs.gateways()
    ...

3. API differences between this and al45tair/netifaces

gateways

The gateways function does not support indexing through the default special key. This is because it makes a sane typing definition difficult to write and be understandable. Instead, if you want the same functionality, the following is exposed:

>>> netifaces.default_gateway()
    ...

The result will be the default gateway for each interface type. The result may be an empty dict if no default route is set.

The level of completness differs a little bit with the original version; some address families might not yet be available and PEER addresses are not reported for now. If you need a feature, open an issue and I will do my best to add it.

Gateways also returned the interfaces indexed by integer values. This is a bit odd (IMO) since the integers values for the interface types are system-dependent. Enum values with a more semantic meaning are now used (they are still tied to linux numbers), but you can use old_api=True in their call to get the al45air-style keys back.

AF_ Constants

In the previous version of netifaces the AF_ constants' value were assigned to be platform independent. This has the nice effect of abstracting the OS when accessing the information of a network layer. However after consideration, it does not feel like the right place to provide abstraction. If you update your project's dependencies to this version of netifaces, be wary of this change. For instance, on linux you may need to replace AF_LINK with AF_PACKET to get mac addresses.

In the future, an extra API will allow accessing a specific layer's information by querying for it, without using the platform's constant.

4. Platform support

Wheels

Building Linux, Windows and macOS cp37-abi3 wheels (requires Python 3.7 and newer)
Install using pip:
python -m pip install netifaces2

Linux

Linux cp37-abi3 wheels are built on manylinux2_17 aka manylinux2014 and require pip>=19.3
cp36m-manylinux2_17 wheels are unsupported and are being built only as a fallback for systems with only Python 3.6 available.

5. License

This software is distributed under a MIT license.

6. Developing Locally

To set up for local development, you will first need to install Rust from rustup.

It's then recommended to create a virtual environment and install the package plus its dependencies into it:

$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate (or .\venv\Scripts\activate.ps1 with Windows Powershell)
$ python3 -m pip install -e '.[dev]' # This internally runs the Rust compiler
$ python3 -m pip install pre-commit
$ source venv/bin/activate # Re-source the venv to pick up new scripts
$ pre-commit install

To recompile the rust code after making changes, run:

$ python3 -m pip install -e .

again.