lennylxx/ipv6-hosts

This repository provides a hosts file intended to improve access to Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia for people in Mainland China using IPv6 connections. A hosts file is a plain text file that exists on every computer. When your computer looks up the address of a website, it checks this file first before asking a DNS server. If the domain name appears in the hosts file, the computer uses the IP address listed there directly and skips the DNS lookup entirely. This repository contains a curated hosts file that maps popular Western services to their IPv6 addresses, bypassing the DNS resolution step that often fails or returns blocked results in China. The reason IPv6 specifically helps in some network configurations in China is that IPv6 infrastructure has historically received different treatment than IPv4 at the network level, sometimes allowing connections that would otherwise be blocked or slowed. The repository also includes two scripts. One is a Python script called update_hosts.py, which uses multi-threading to look up the current IPv6 addresses for all the domains in the file and update it automatically. Running DNS lookups manually for hundreds of domains would be tedious, so the script automates this. You can specify a custom DNS server, how many parallel threads to use, and whether to include the canonical names. The second is a shell script called merge_snippets.sh that combines separate partial hosts files into one. The README lists several public DNS servers in the US, Hong Kong, and Japan that can be used with the update script, since the default DNS server in China may not return accurate results for these domains. The code is MIT licensed. The hosts file content itself is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0, meaning you can share and adapt it for non-commercial purposes with attribution.