How can I use Python to get the system hostname

Question

I m writing a chat program for a local network  I would like be able to identify computers and get the user-set computer name with Python

User · Answer

On some systems  the hostname is set in the environment  If that is the case for you  the os module can pull it out of the environment via os getenv  For example  if HOSTNAME is the environment variable containing what you want  the following will get it   import os system name   os getenv  HOSTNAME     Update  As noted in the comments  this doesn t always work  as not everyone s environment is set up this way  I believe that at the time I initially answered this I was using this solution as it was the first thing I d found in a web search and it worked for me at the time  Due to the lack of portability I probably wouldn t use this now  However  I am leaving this answer for reference purposes  FWIW  it does eliminate the need for other imports if your environment has the system name and you are already importing the os module  Test it - if it doesn t work in all the environments in which you expect your program to operate  use one of the other solutions provided

User · Answer

socket gethostname   could do

User · Answer

I needed the name of the PC to use in my PyLog conf file  and the socket library is not available  but os library is   For Windows I used    os getenv  COMPUTERNAME    defaultValue     Where defaultValue is a string to prevent None being returned

User · Answer

If I m correct  you re looking for the socket gethostname function    gt  gt  import socket  gt  gt  socket gethostname    terminus

User · Answer

Both of these are pretty portable   import platform platform node    import socket socket gethostname     Any solutions using the HOST or HOSTNAME environment variables are not portable   Even if it works on your system when you run it  it may not work when run in special environments such as cron

User · Answer

You will probably load the os module anyway  so another suggestion would be   import os myhost   os uname   1

User · Answer

os getenv  HOSTNAME   and os environ  HOSTNAME   don t always work  In cron jobs and WSDL  HTTP HOSTNAME isn t set  Use this instead   import socket socket gethostbyaddr socket gethostname    0    It always  even on Windows  returns a fully qualified host name  even if you defined a short alias in  etc hosts   If you defined an alias in  etc hosts then socket gethostname   will return the alias  platform uname   1  does the same thing   I ran into a case where the above didn t work  This is what I m using now   import socket if socket gethostname   find      gt  0      name socket gethostname   else      name socket gethostbyaddr socket gethostname    0    It first calls gethostname to see if it returns something that looks like a host name  if not it uses my original solution

User · Answer

Use socket and its gethostname   functionality  This will get the hostname of the computer where the Python interpreter is running   import socket print socket gethostname

User · Answer

What about    import platform  h   platform uname   1    Actually you may want to have a look to all the result in platform uname

User · Answer

To get fully qualified hostname use socket getfqdn   import socket  print socket getfqdn

User · Answer

From at least python    3 3   You can use the field nodename and avoid using array indexing   os uname   nodename   Although  even the documentation of os uname suggests using socket gethostname

User · Answer

You have to execute this line of code  sock name   socket gethostname     And then you can use the name to find the addr    print socket gethostbyname sock name

[python] How can I use Python to get the system hostname?

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