Skip to content

netimps

The network utilities every tool ends up rewriting — interface discovery, "which is my IP", reachability checks, CIDR maths, host:port parsing, DNS, ping, scanning and multicast — as one typed, flat-import library.

Built on the standard library: the only runtime dependency is dnspython, and only resolve() uses it. Interface enumeration, routing and multicast are ctypes bindings to the platform's own APIs, so there is nothing to compile and no wheel to miss for your platform.

Installation

pip install netimps

Requires Python 3.9+.

30-second tour

import netimps
from netimps import IPNetwork, MACAddress, parse

# Interfaces: names, MACs, MTU and real prefixes on every OS
for iface in netimps.get_interfaces():
    print(iface.name, iface.mac, iface.mtu, [str(ip) for ip in iface.ips])

# One parsing entry point; types are what you annotate with
parse("10.0.0.5/24", IPNetwork)          # IPv4Network('10.0.0.0/24')
netimps.try_parse("nope", netimps.IPAddress)     # None

# Which of my addresses actually reaches that host?
netimps.get_source_ip("8.8.8.8")         # IPv4Address(...)

# The honest reachability test
netimps.tcp_check("example.com", 443)    # True

Design notes

A few behaviours are deliberate:

  • Interface.is_loopback is computed from addresses, not names — lo, lo0 and Loopback Pseudo-Interface 1 share no spelling.
  • Concrete types are strict about family. parse("::1", IPAddress) works; parse("::1", IPv4Address) raises rather than quietly returning v6.
  • resolve raises on a malformed query rather than returning [] — a typo'd record type should not look like "no such record".
  • ping(ttl=...) behaves the same on every OS. Windows ping exits 0 for "TTL expired in transit", so the reply address is verified instead of trusting the exit code.
  • discover_mtu measures the real path, sending DF-flagged pings, while get_pmtu only reports what the kernel already cached (usually nothing, and never anything on Windows).

Learn more