Awesome

This project is no longer under active development, but I will do my best to address any bug reports. See porkbun-automatic-dns for its spiritual successor for a different domain/DNS provider. Thanks to everyone who has contributed by reporting issues and opening pull requests over the 11 years (!) since I started this project.

gad

This script is intended to be used as a cron job to maintain the accuracy of multiple A or AAAA records in a Gandi.net zonefile. External IP address discovery is done via a network interface, OpenDNS, or a custom command piped to standard input. The result is compared to the value in the active version of the zonefile of each record in RECORD-NAMES.

Prerequisites

For Gandi's LiveDNS platform, generate a personal access token (PAT) to authenticate. API keys are deprecated and are not supported by gad (if you'd like to fully migrate to PATs, you should delete any API keys from the authentication options of your account settings). Generate a PAT by selecting your organization from the Organizations panel and clicking the button to create a token in the Personal Access Token (PAT) section. You should restrict the token to the domain names that you plan on updating with gad, and only select the See and renew domain names and Manage domain name technical configurations permissions.

If you are on Gandi's legacy platform, request an API key here. Your domain also needs to be using a zone that you are allowed to edit. The default Gandi zone does not allow editing, so you must create a copy.

Requirements

Bourne shell
OpenSSL or LibreSSL

If you're using an OS that doesn't include the ifconfig or dig commands you have three options:

Install a package that provides the dig command, commonly bind-tools or dnsutils (to use IP discovery via OpenDNS)
Install a package that provides the ifconfig command, commonly net-tools (to use IP discovery via a network interface)
Use the -s flag and pipe a custom command that outputs your external IP address to gad, e.g., curl ipinfo.io/ip | gad -s -a APIKEY -d EXAMPLE.COM -r "RECORD-NAMES"

Installation

The simplest way to install gad is to clone this repository. You can optionally add the repository folder to your PATH environment variable to make running gad easier, but you should specify its full path when creating a crontab entry. Personally, I have a ~/bin folder that is already in my PATH where I create a symlink for gad, and a ~/git folder that I clone the repository into:

git clone https://github.com/brianreumere/gandi-automatic-dns.git ~/git/gandi-automatic-dns
ln -s /home/brian/git/gandi-automatic-dns/gad /home/brian/bin/gad

To set up a crontab entry to run gad on a schedule, store your API key in the ~/.gandiapi file (run chmod 600 ~/.gandiapi to make sure no other users have permissions to this file), and then run crontab -e and add a line similar to the following (this example will run gad every 15 minutes and update the @ and www records of the domain example.net):

0,15,30,45 * * * * /home/brian/bin/gad -i em0 -d example.net -r "@ www"

If you have issues with the openssl s_client command hanging, and you have access to the timeout utility from GNU coreutils, you can precede the path to the gad command with something like timeout -k 10s 60s (to send a TERM signal after 60 seconds and a KILL signal 10 seconds later if it's still running).

The v5/LiveDNS API allows up to 1000 requests per minute and the legacy API has a limit of 30 requests every 2 seconds, so you should be able to run gad more frequently than every 15 minutes (when no record updates are required, gad makes one API call per record, and one additional call when using the legacy API to get the active zone ID).

Command-line usage

Run gad with no options or gad -h to view this usage info from the command line.

Usage: gad [-h] [-x] [-6] [-f] [-t] [-e] [-v] [-s] [-i EXT_IF] [-p KEYFILE|-a APIKEY] [-l TTL] -d EXAMPLE.COM -r "RECORD-NAMES"

-h: Print this usage info and exit
-x: Use Gandi's legacy XML-RPC API
-6: Update AAAA record(s) instead of A record(s)
-f: Force the creation of a new zonefile regardless of IP address or TTL discrepancy
-t: On Gandi's legacy DNS platform, if a new version of the zonefile is created, don't activate it; on LiveDNS, just print the updates that would be made if this flag wasn't used.
-e: Print debugging information to stdout
-v: Print information to stdout even if an update isn't needed
-s: Use stdin instead of OpenDNS to determine external IP address

-i EXT_IF: The name of your external network interface (optional, if provided uses ifconfig instead of OpenDNS to determine external IP address
-p KEYFILE: Path to the file that contains your PAT or API key (defaults to ~/.gandiapi)
-a APIKEY: Your PAT (for LiveDNS) or API key (for the legacy API) provided by Gandi (optional, loaded from a file if not specified)
-l TTL: Set a custom TTL on records (optional, and only supported on LiveDNS)
-d EXAMPLE.COM: The domain name whose active zonefile will be updated (required)
-r RECORD-NAMES: A space-separated list of the name(s) of the A or AAAA record(s) to update or create (required)

Function syntax

rpc "methodName" "datatype" "value" "struct" "name" "datatype" "value"

The rpc function can accept an arbitrary number of datatype/value pairs and structs and their member name/datatype/value tuples. structs must be last! Valid method names can be found in the legacy XML-RPC API documentation. Note that the APIKEY value from the command line is automatically included as the first parameter.

rest "verb" "apiEndpoint" "body"

The rest function can call arbitrary endpoints of Gandi's LiveDNS REST API. If the verb is not GET, the function expects a third parameter to use as the body of the POST or PUT request. Valid API endpoints can be found in the LiveDNS API documentation. Your PAT from the command line, the file specified by the -p flag, or the ~/.gandiapi file is automatically included in the Authorization header.