Hostname retrieval in Go (Get hostname)

There's a good chance you're familiar with hostnames in the context of computing. But if you are not, a hostname is a unique label that is assigned to a given device in a computer network.

The role of the hostname is to help identify and locate devices on the network which makes it an important feature in network related tasks.

In this tutorial, we will learn all the different methods and techniques that we can use to programmatically retrieve the hostname of a system using the Go programming language.

Why would I need a hostname?

Although this may vary depending on your needs and application requirements, some common use cases where you may need to retrieve a machine's hostname include the following:

1. Configuration management – ​​A common use case of hostnames is when configuring services and applications on a remote machine.
2. Logging and monitoring – Another use case is when you need to include the hostname identifier in the logs for identification.
3. Network Programming – If you need to do any kind of network programming, you will need a hostname. For example, establishing a connection or resolving an IP address and much more.

Keeping all this in mind, let us learn various methods and techniques to get the hostname of a machine.

Method 1: Using OS Package

The most command and straightforward way to retrieve a hostname in Go is to use the os package. The OS package includes a low-level implementation of interacting with the hostname that includes basic networking functions.

Consider the following example code that demonstrates how to use an os package to fetch the hostname of a given system:

In this example, we start by importing the FMT and OS packages to work with OS-related tasks.

We then call the os.Hostname() function to retrieve the hostname of the current machine. We also make sure to handle possible errors that may occur when trying to retrieve a hostname.

Finally, we can print the hostname as:

One advantage of using the OS package is that it is very straightforward and works on almost any system that has the Go compiler installed.

Method 2: Using syscall package (win)

The second method we can use to fetch hostname in Go is to use the syscall package. This method provides more control and can be useful when we need to perform low-level system interactions.

Here's an example of how to use a syscall package to fetch a hostname:

This should return the hostname of the current machine.

The main drawback of this technology is that it is Windows specific only.

Method 3: Using External Commands

We can dial back the process of using system packages and use Go to call external commands that can help retrieve the hostname and capture the output.

This is possible using the os/exec package. An example code implementation is as follows:

In this example, we create a variable called “cmd” that contains the hostname command. This command allows us to get the hostname of the local machine.

We then use the cmd.Output() method to execute the command and capture the resulting output.

Method 4: Using Psutil

If you are not familiar with psutil or process and system utilities, it is a free and open-source cross-platform library for obtaining information about running processes and system usage. This includes resources like CPU, memory, disk, network, sensors and more.

By default, psutil is implemented in Python. But luckily, we have a version that is ported to Go that we can use to retrieve hostnames and other amazing functions.

Start by installing the package using the “go get” command as follows:

Once installed, we can create the following code to retrieve the hostname of the system:

This example uses the host.Info() method to gather information about the host. Finally, we retrieve the hostname value and print it to the console.

conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned everything about the hostname feature in Go. We have also covered all the methods you can use to retrieve the hostname of a local machine.