Awesome
whois
Lightweight library for retrieving WHOIS information on a domain.
It automatically retrieves the appropriate WHOIS server based on the domain's TLD by first querying IANA.
Usage
As an executable
To install it:
go install github.com/TwiN/whois/cmd/whois@latest
Alternatively, you can download whois from the release section, though you'll have to unzip the file first.
To run it:
whois example.com
As a library
go get github.com/TwiN/whois
Query
If all you want is the text a WHOIS server would return you, you can use the Query
method of the whois.Client
type:
package main
import "github.com/TwiN/whois"
func main() {
client := whois.NewClient()
output, err := client.Query("example.com")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
println(output)
}
QueryAndParse
If you want specific pieces of information, you can use the QueryAndParse
method of the whois.Client
type:
package main
import "github.com/TwiN/whois"
func main() {
client := whois.NewClient()
response, err := client.QueryAndParse("example.com")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
println(response.ExpirationDate.String())
}
Note that because there is no standardized format for WHOIS responses, this parsing may not be successful for every single TLD.
Currently, the only fields parsed are:
ExpirationDate
: The time.Time at which the domain will expireDomainStatuses
: The statuses that the domain currently has (e.g.clientTransferProhibited
)NameServers
: The nameservers currently tied to the domain
If you'd like one or more other fields to be parsed, please don't be shy and create an issue or a pull request.
Caching referral WHOIS servers
The way that WHOIS scales is by having one "main" WHOIS server, namely whois.iana.org:43
, refer to other WHOIS server
on a per-TLD basis.
In other word, let's say that you wanted to have the WHOIS information for example.com
.
The first step would be to query whois.iana.org:43
with com
, which would return whois.verisign-grs.com
.
Then, you would query whois.verisign-grs.com:43
for the WHOIS information on example.com
.
If you're querying a lot of servers, making two queries instead of one can be a little wasteful, hence WithReferralCache(true)
:
client := whois.NewClient().WithReferralCache(true)
The above will cache the referral WHOIS server for each TLD, so that you can directly query the appropriate WHOIS server
instead of first querying whois.iana.org:43
for the referral.