Welcome to Avahi

Quick Links

What is Avahi?

Avahi is a system which facilitates service discovery on a local network via the mDNS/DNS-SD protocol suite. This enables you to plug your laptop or computer into a network and instantly be able to view other people who you can chat with, find printers to print to or find files being shared. Compatible technology is found in Apple MacOS X (branded "Bonjour" and sometimes "Zeroconf").

Avahi is primarily targetted at Linux systems and ships by default in most distributions. It is not ported to Windows at this stage, but will run on many other BSD-like systems. The primary API is D-Bus and is required for usage of most of Avahi, however services can be published using an XML service definition placed in /etc/avahi/services.

See also the nss-mdns project, which allows hostname lookup of *.local hostnames via mDNS in all system programs using nsswitch

Definition at Wikipedia

News

December 2023

* 2023-12-04: The avahi repositories on GitHub have moved from lathiat's namespace to the new avahi organisation namespace. You can find them at https://github.com/avahi/avahi and https://github.com/avahi/nss-mdns.
* 2023-12-06: The avahi.org website has been moved from the previous host to GitHub Pages. If there are any issues, please file a bug against the website repository github.com/avahi/avahi.github.io. Currently the file index at /download/ does not work, which may break anyone monitoring this directory for new releases (such as Debian watch), this issue is tracked in Issue #2.

February 2020

* 2020-02-18: We have released Avahi 0.8! This release has a number of new features and a D-Bus/avahi-core API change related to racing signals with D-Bus object creation. For full details of all bug fixes, changes and new features check out the release page or docs/NEWS!

July 2017

* 2017-07-10: We have released Avahi 0.7! The main new feature of this release is the ability to encode binary (non-text) TXT records into XML service definitions (/etc/avahi/services). For full details of all bug fixes, changes and new features check the release page

February 2016

* 2016-02-16: We have released Avahi 0.6.32! This is a bugfix release with a couple of minor new configuration options or default changes. Full details and downloads at the link. Please file any issues or pull requests through github.com/avahi/avahi

October 2015

* 2015-10-10: We have a release candidate, 0.6.32-rc! This is mostly a bugfix release, see the NEWS (Change Log). This is intended for release soon, please file any issues you notice through github.com/avahi/avahi.

February 2012

* 2012-02-15: We have released Avahi 0.6.31! This is a bugfix release.

April 2011

* 2011-04-04: We have released Avahi 0.6.30! This is a bugfix release.

March 2011

* 2011-03-09: We have released Avahi 0.6.29! This is a bugfix release and fixes a minor security issue.

August 2010

* 2010-10-05: We have released Avahi 0.6.28! This is a bugfix release.

July 2010

* 2010-07-13: We have released Avahi 0.6.27! This is a bugfix release.

June 2010

* 2010-06-29: We have released Avahi 0.6.26! This is a bugfix release and fixes a minor security issue.