Is there any way I can use ‘nmap’ port scanner, to generate and output result on my Django App

I’m trying to create some network app in Django, and what I would like to ask: Is it possible to do something like this: Client type IP address, than server scans it with ‘nmap’, after that the result passed to the Django app, and than I do whole bunch of stuff with it.

Just want to know is it possible to make it, or it sounds ridiculous?

Answer

My suggestion would be something along the lines of:

pout,perr = subprocess.Popen(['nmap', '192.168.1.2', '-oX', '-'], shell=False, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

xml_results = pout.read()

There are a couple nmapXML -> Python dict scripts floating around as well if you google a bit.

There’s somewhat of a problem with this approach – lets call it the naive approach because it doesn’t scale very well, or deal with things like the machine not pinging and nmap falling back to slow-scan (which can take literally hours depending on the target network)

Consider making a server that runs nmap asyncronously and can provide status back to the user – as well as the ability to cancel a scan in progress.