Get Mac Serial Number Programmatically With Cgo
I recently had the occassion to obtain the serial number from a Mac within a Go program. Rather than shelling out to system_profiler or ioreg, I opted to use Cgo and retrieve the serial number via the IOKit framework. Here’s how that looks:
package main
// #cgo LDFLAGS: -framework CoreFoundation -framework IOKit
// #include <CoreFoundation/CoreFoundation.h>
// #include <IOKit/IOKitLib.h>
//
// const char *
// getSerialNumber()
// {
// CFMutableDictionaryRef matching = IOServiceMatching("IOPlatformExpertDevice");
// io_service_t service = IOServiceGetMatchingService(kIOMasterPortDefault, matching);
// CFStringRef serialNumber = IORegistryEntryCreateCFProperty(service,
// CFSTR("IOPlatformSerialNumber"), kCFAllocatorDefault, 0);
// const char *str = CFStringGetCStringPtr(serialNumber, kCFStringEncodingUTF8);
// IOObjectRelease(service);
//
// return str;
// }
import "C"
import (
"fmt"
)
func main() {
serialNumber := C.GoString(C.getSerialNumber())
fmt.Println(serialNumber)
}
Make sure that the import C line goes directly below the C code, otherwise it will fail with something like the following:
./get_mac_serial_number.go:26:29: could not determine kind of name for C.getSerialNumber
Hopefully this helps the next time you need to get the serial number of a Mac in Golang!