hosts

A command line tool for managing hosts files.

The tool relies on the hosts file being formatted a particular way to denote its sections. See this example. Sections are indicated via comments like this:

# <work>
0.0.0.0 facebook.com
0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com
# </work>

Sections may be nested inside other sections.

This formatting was inspired by the organization used in the hosts files maintained by Dan Pollock. Hosts files provided on that site should be usable with this script.

Installation

hosts is installable via pip.

pip install https://github.com/dhaffner/hosts.git

After that, type hosts -h to verify that the install completed successfully.

Usage

For a full list of options, run:

hosts -h

Specify a hosts file as input and list its sections

hosts -i /etc/hosts sections

Enable a section in a hosts file

hosts enable work

Enable a section in a hosts file that is nested in another section

Use . to refer to sections that are nested.

hosts enable work.distractions

Disable a section in a hosts file

hosts disable spam-sites

Print out all hosts in a given section

hosts show ad-sites

Backup a hosts file to a given destination.

hosts backup ~/.hosts/

Install a hosts file.

This command copies a given file to /etc/hosts, so it must be run with root priveleges.

sudo hosts install ~/.hosts/hosts-1392231273

Workflow: backup, disable, save, and install

hosts backup ~/.hosts/
hosts disable work > ~/.hosts/hosts-work
sudo hosts install ~/.hosts/hosts-work

TODO / Feature ideas

Add/remove a given mapping (IP, hostname) to a section of hosts file
Show mappings involving a given IP or hostname
Optionally install new hosts file after enable/disable/etc action