Getting uniqe docker container name from within container

I had a use case in which I needed to obtain a unique identifier of a container from within the container. The problem is that container is started with docker-compose using scale option so that a number of indentical containers are started. Googling around gave me some options like examining /proc/self/cgroups, but in my case, this file didn't contain anything useful. Another solution was to pass environment variable from the outside which also looked like a mess. In the end, I came up with not so elegant solution, but the one that works. I use Python, but the concept could be used with other programming languages as well.

First, environment variable contains image name, e.g. crawler. So, you can use the following Python expression to obtain this name:

import os
hostname = os.environ['HOSTNAME']

Variable hostname will contain crawler in our example. Next, resolve this name to IP address:

import socket
ip = socket.gethostbyname(hostname)

This will give you IP address of the container, e.g. 172.25.0.12. Now, you should do a reverse lookup. BUT, you can not use gethostbyaddr since it will return to you the same hostname as the one you obtained from HOSTNAME environment variable. The reason is that gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr use /etc/hosts file first. Instead, you have to use DNS. Unfortunately, this is where external library is needed. You can install and use dnspython, and then do a reverse lookup:

from dns import resolver,reversename
addr=reversename.from_address(ip)
str(resolver.resolve(addr,"PTR")[0]).split('.')[0]

The reason for the last mess is that resolver.resolve returns tupple with FQDN in the zero-th element, and then FQDN has to be splitted on dots to take the hostname only.