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I would like to be able to perform a ping and traceroute from within Python without having to execute the corresponding shell commands so I'd prefer a native python solution.

Dave Forgac
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7 Answers7

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If you don't mind using an external module and not using UDP or TCP, scapy is an easy solution:

from scapy.all import *
target = ["192.168.1.254"]
result, unans = traceroute(target,l4=UDP(sport=RandShort())/DNS(qd=DNSQR(qname="www.google.com")))

Or you can use the tcp version

from scapy.all import *
target = ["192.168.1.254"]
result, unans = traceroute(target,maxttl=32)

Please note you will have to run scapy as root in order to be able to perform these tasks or you will get:

socket.error: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted
akaihola
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Andre de Miranda
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  • Thanks for your post. I need help with following things. I am unable to use traceroute function. I have installed scapy v2.4 and imported this in the python program. from scapy.all import *. I also need to print the time with each hop. Can you please help with this. – Hussain ali Oct 28 '18 at 03:04
  • Depending on the Python version you are using, you can pip install the specific scapy version that you need. Check this out: https://scapy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html – George Adams Mar 23 '22 at 22:26
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Running interpreters as root is often frowned upon on security grounds (and of course you DO need to have root permission to access the "raw" socked as needed by the ICMP specs of ping and traceroute!), but if you have no problems with that it's not hard -- e.g., this post(dead?) or this post give a workable ping, and Jeremy Hylton's old page has still-usable underlying code for ICMP (both ping and traceroute) though it's written for very old Python versions and needs a litte facelift to shine with modern ones -- but, the concepts ARE all there, in both the URLs I gave you!

JGC
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Alex Martelli
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    It's entirely possible to ping and traceroute without raw sockets or ICMP, with UDP packets. Many tools do this. – Glenn Maynard Jul 20 '09 at 05:30
  • @Glenn, that's not compatible with the actual ping and traceroute commands: if your counterparts support UDP echoes, these pseudo-ping and -traceroute versions will work, but, without ICMP, you're outside of the standard, and your checks might perfectly well fail (without a counterpart complying beyond standards) where the standard ICMP-based approaches would work. – Alex Martelli Jul 20 '09 at 05:43
  • Thanks. I guess I'm going to go back to trying this using the shell commands. New question about doing this here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1151897/how-can-i-perform-a-ping-or-traceroute-in-python-accessing-the-output-as-it-is-p – Dave Forgac Jul 20 '09 at 05:55
  • shelling out to the setuid-root commands is generally the best way, yep -- lemme look at your other question now. – Alex Martelli Jul 20 '09 at 06:01
  • ping does use ICMP, but standard UNIX traceroute actually uses UDP by default (although it can be told to use ICMP instead). You don't need UDP echoes, because a closed port should elict an ICMP "Destination Unreachable" with a code of 0x03 ("Port Unreachable"). – caf Jul 20 '09 at 06:10
  • UDP traceroute is every bit as standard as ICMP. Just like ICMP, it's a natural side-effect of the standard TTL field. Ping is trickier--many secured systems simply discard packets to unopened ports, and if it's coincidentally an open port--you can't guarantee it isn't--then it probably won't work. – Glenn Maynard Jul 20 '09 at 06:46
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    Both links are giving 404s now, making this link only answer useless. – Peilonrayz Apr 17 '19 at 13:03
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The Webb Library is very handy in performing all kinds of web related extracts...and ping and traceroute can be done easily through it. Just include the URL you want to traceroute to:

import webb
webb.traceroute("your-web-page-url")

If you wish to store the traceroute log to a text file automatically, use the following command:

webb.traceroute("your-web-page-url",'file-name.txt')

Similarly a IP address of a URl (server) can be obtained with the following lines of code:

print(webb.get_ip("your-web-page-url"))

Hope it helps!

hnvasa
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    The webb library hasn't been updated in years and glaring Python3 bug hasn't been resolved, would not recommend usage in production code. – Sherd Dec 27 '21 at 20:12
  • After seeing the comment above I looked a little closer.. You should too before you use webb... Regardless, it (webb) claims there are no dependencies, all self-contained. Seems very dependent on certain OS and underlying OS installed programs like tracert. – tc0nn Dec 11 '22 at 20:20
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The mtrpacket package can be used to send network probes, which can perform either a ping or a traceroute. Since it uses the back-end to the mtr commandline tool, it doesn't require that your script run as root.

It also uses asyncio's event loop, so you can have multiple ongoing traceroutes or pings simultaneously, and deal with their results as they complete.

Here is a Python script to traceroute to 'example.com':

import asyncio
import mtrpacket

async def trace():
    async with mtrpacket.MtrPacket() as mtr:
        for ttl in range(1, 256):
            result = await mtr.probe('example.com', ttl=ttl)
            print(result)

            if result.success:
                break

asyncio.get_event_loop().run_until_complete(trace())

The loop with 'ttl' is used because the 'time-to-live' of an outgoing packet determines the number of network hops the packet will travel before expiring and sending an error back to the original source.

mkimball
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0

you might want to check out the scapy package. it's the swiss army knife of network tools for python.

Autoplectic
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I wrote a simple tcptraceroute in python which does not need root privileges http://www.thomas-guettler.de/scripts/tcptraceroute.py.txt

But it can't display the IP addresses of the intermediate hops. But sometimes it is useful, since you can guess where the blocking firewall is: Either at the beginning or at the end of the route.

guettli
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0

ICMP Ping is standard as part of the ICMP protocol.

Traceroute uses features of ICMP and IP to determine a path via Time To Live values. Using TTL values, you can do traceroutes in a variety of protocols as long as IP/ICMP work because it is the ICMP TTL EXceeded messages that tell you about the hop in the path.

If you attempt to access a port where no listener is available, by ICMP protocol rules, the host is supposed to send an ICMP Port Unreachable message.

Dougie
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