denisbrodbeck/machineid

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1176 stars · 160 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A Go library and small CLI that reads the operating system's native machine ID (machine UUID/GUID) on Windows, Linux, macOS, and BSD without requiring admin privileges. It also offers a cryptographically secure ProtectedID function that HMAC-SHA256 hashes the machine ID with an application-specific key.

Use cases

• get a unique machine id in go without admin rights
• identify a host machine cross-platform
• generate a hashed device id for license keys
• fingerprint a machine for telemetry or analytics
• get machine guid on windows from go
• read /etc/machine-id or IOPlatformUUID programmatically

When to choose

• you need a stable per-OS machine identifier in a Go application
• you want device identification without touching MAC addresses, CPU IDs, or BIOS data
• you need a privacy-friendlier hashed machine ID for licensing or telemetry
• you need a small dependency-free CLI to print a host's machine id

When to avoid

• you need hardware-level identification that survives OS reinstalls or cloning
• you require tamper-proof device binding (root/admin can change these IDs)
• you are not using Go and need a native library in another language
• you need identification in VMs cloned from the same image, where IDs may collide

Facets

library · maturity stable

security cli developer-tools developer-tools cross-platform security windows bsd go cross-platform cli machine-id host-identification hmac device-fingerprinting licensing telemetry linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="denisbrodbeck/machineid")