native-machine-id

Native retrieval of a unique desktop machine ID without admin privileges or child processes. Faster and more reliable alternative to node-machine-id.

Installation

npm install native-machine-id

Or use it directly in the CLI

npx native-machine-id
npx native-machine-id --raw

Usage

As a module

import { getMachineId } from 'native-machine-id';

// Get the machine ID, hashed with SHA-256
const hashedId = getMachineId();
console.log('Hashed Machine ID:', hashedId);

// Get the raw machine ID (should not be exposed in untrusted environments)
const rawId = getMachineId({ raw: true });
console.log('Original Machine ID:', rawId);

// Or synchronously
import { getMachineIdSync } from 'native-machine-id';
const id = getMachineIdSync();

Supported Platforms

macOS: Uses the IOPlatformUUID from the IOKit framework.
Linux: Uses the /var/lib/dbus/machine-id file to retrieve the machine ID. If this file does not exist, it falls back to /etc/machine-id.
Windows: Uses the MachineGuid from the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography registry.

Comparison with `node-machine-id`

This module provides similar functionality to node-machine-id while using native access to system APIs without the need for child processes, making it much faster and reliable.

Here's a table of performance comparisons between the two libraries, based on the average runtime from 1000 iterations of the getMachineIdSync and machineIdSync functions, from scripts/benchmark.ts:

Test	node-machine-id	native-machine-id	Improvement
Mac
Raw	10.71ms	0.0072ms	1494x
Hashed	12.42ms	0.0176ms	707x
Linux
Raw	3.26ms	0.0059ms	557x
Hashed	3.25ms	0.0088ms	368x
Windows
Raw	45.36ms*	0.0122ms	3704x
Hashed	28.66ms*	0.0272ms	1053x

* - Windows tests may be inaccurate due to potential caching.

Migrating from `node-machine-id`

If you were previously using node-machine-id, you can use the following mapping to get a result with the following hashing transformation. This is not guaranteed always to 1:1 match the output of node-machine-id for all cases. For example on Linux, it falls back to /etc/machine-id if /var/lib/dbus/machine-id is not available.

import { createHash } from 'crypto';
import { getMachineIdSync } from 'native-machine-id';

function machineIdSync(original: boolean): string | undefined {
  const rawMachineId = getMachineIdSync({ raw: true }).toLowerCase();

  return original
    ? rawMachineId
    : createHash('sha256').update(rawMachineId).digest('hex');
}

Credits

Influenced by the work from denisbrodbeck/machineid and automation-stack/node-machine-id.

License

Apache-2.0