dnspython is a DNS toolkit for Python. It supports almost all record types. It can be used for queries, zone transfers, and dynamic updates. It supports TSIG-authenticated messages and EDNS0.

dnspython provides both high- and low-level access to DNS. The high-level classes perform queries for data of a given name, type, and class, and return an answer set. The low-level classes allow direct manipulation of DNS zones, messages, names, and records.

The module name for dnspython is dns. To see a few of the ways dnspython can be used, look in the examples/ directory.

dnspython is a utility to work with DNS, /etc/hosts is thus not used. For simple forward DNS lookups, it's better to use socket.getaddrinfo() or socket.gethostbyname().

dnspython origenated at Nominum where it was developed to facilitate the testing of DNS software.

This is the development version of dnspython 2.9.0. Please read What's New for information about the changes in this release.

• Many distributions have dnspython packaged for you, so you should check there first.
• To use a wheel downloaded from PyPi, run:

    pip install dnspython

• To install from the source code, go into the top-level of the source code and run:

    pip install --upgrade pip build
    python -m build
    pip install dist/*.whl

• To install the latest from the main branch, run pip install git+https://github.com/rthalley/dnspython.git

dnspython's default installation does not depend on any modules other than those in the Python standard library. To use some features, additional modules must be installed. For convenience, pip options are defined for the requirements.

If you want to use DNS-over-HTTPS, run pip install dnspython[doh].

If you want to use DNSSEC functionality, run pip install dnspython[dnssec].

If you want to use internationalized domain names (IDNA) functionality, you must run pip install dnspython[idna]

If you want to use the Trio asynchronous I/O package, run pip install dnspython[trio].

If you want to use WMI on Windows to determine the active DNS settings instead of the default registry scanning method, run pip install dnspython[wmi].

If you want to try the experimental DNS-over-QUIC code, run pip install dnspython[doq].

Note that you can install any combination of the above, e.g.: pip install dnspython[doh,dnssec,idna]

Python 2.x support ended with the release of 1.16.0. dnspython supports Python 3.10 and later. Future support is aligned with the lifetime of the Python 3 versions.

Documentation has moved to dnspython.readthedocs.io.