Action proposal: Get devices in your network

[muametgrooby]

Description

When I am connected to Wi-Fi, I want a list of devices on my network so I can connect to them, I wanted to build a shortcut that would get a list of all devices in my network and control them using SSH commands. This would also be useful when your local ip address changes and for whatever reason you can not assign a static one. There are apps that do this (Fing, iNet) but they do not seem to provide an action for this.

[sindresorhus]

I looked into this extensively yesterday. It seems like all the methods to do this are deprecated and the new replacement API does not support this use-case. Scanning the network on iOS would also require special entitlement that Apple has to manually approve. So I'm unfortunately unlikely to do this. But I'll leave it open in case anyone wants to work on this.

[sindresorhus]

Some technical info. NWBrowser is the modern way to discover devices, but it does not support wildcard searching (you have to specify a type), and it's also not able to resolve the IP address without actually connecting to the devices. This leaves us with NetService, which is deprecated, or the archaic low-level <dns_sd.h> API, which I would not want to touch.

Some more resources:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/12251763/64949
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60579798/how-to-resolve-addresses-and-port-information-from-an-nwendpoint-service-enum-ca
• https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/663875
• If using NetService, it also requires double-browsing: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51513970/nsnetservicebrowsing-cannot-resolve-services-with-error-72004

It's really too bad. It would have been easy to achieve this if NWBrowser supported wildcard type. It could simply have been:

import Network

let browser = NWBrowser(for: .bonjour(type: "_services._dns-sd._udp" , domain: "local."), using: .udp)

browser.browseResultsChangedHandler = { results, changes in
	// …
}

browser.start(queue: DispatchQueue.main)