AUTODNS

A friendly little python app for a DIY inspired DynDNS client, leveraging AWS Route53

Installation

I'm not presently publishing this on Pypi - so you'll need to fetch and install it as if it were a development release (which it is).

git clone http://github.com/chuckbutler/autodns.git
cd autodns
python setup.py install

This will fetch all of the required dependencies and place autodns in your /usr/local/bin path.

It may be saner/cleaner to use a virtualenv. This is documented all over the web so I'll let you use your google skills to determine how/if you want to do this.

Configuration / Usage

AutoDNS works on a few basic principals:

• Each domain is their own configuration file
• We wont be editing APEX records, only A records
• You have internet connectivity
• You want DNS updated on a regular schedule
• You have exported your AWS Access Credentials to your environment

To get familiar with all of AutoDNS's commands, simply pass it a -h flag.

autodns -h

Update DNS entries on rt53 quickly and easily.

positional arguments:
  config             Specify configuration file to parse

  optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -l LOG, --log LOG  log to PATH
  -v, --debug        display debug output

Autodns uses configuration files (one per parent-level domain, or ZONEID) to not only configure, but also to cache the last IP it sent to the server - it adds this field automatically, so dont worry about adding that to begin with. The configuration has a few levels of keys in YAML format and will look like the following:

ZONEID: P23QZY95VZHATG
DOMAINS:
  - pad.autodns.net
  - minecraft.autodns.net
TTL: 300

Note: Ensure you use a FQDN in the DOMAINS array - as this is how we tell AWS Rt53 what we are adding / modifying. Without a FQDN the request will fail and you'll be left to dig through the logs to see what went wrong.

The required keys are:

• ZONEID
• DOMAINS
• TTL

Notice that they are all CAPS, and this is by design. Where possible, meaningful error messages were attempted to be raised. If you encounter any bugs - simply submit them to the issue tracker.

I ran autodns after adding a record and it said "nothing to do" - what gives?

The ADDRESS key will be parsed out of the YAML and is the determinent if an update needs to take place. If you are adding a dns entry to the configuration - you will want to completely remove the ADDRESS key, so it is forced to push a fresh update. This will send a request to all of the subdomains in the configuration, and once completed - will resume normal operation.

I want to run this periodically like a DynDNS client, how do I do that?

Glad you asked! This is exactly why I built AutoDNS. To get AutoDNS to run on a schedule you will need to place it in your users crontab:

crontab -e

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=XXXXX
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=XXXXX
* */1 * * * autodns path/to/config.yml -l $HOME/autodns.log

This will run AutoDNS every hour, and log the output to $HOME/autodns.log - effectively replacing any legacy DynDNS client functionality you may have had on your router. Note that this only gets run while the machine running AutoDNS is on.

Where do I get the ZONEID field?

Log into your AWS Rt53 control panel, and it will be listed by your Domain Name