Whois

A pure Elixir WHOIS client and parser.

WHOIS information includes things like which registrar a domain is registered with, who the contacts for the domain are, when the domain was first registered, when its registration expires, when the DNS record was last updated, and more (but see the "Caveats" section below).

This library supports querying the WHOIS server for a large number of top-level domains, including but not limited to:

• .com
• .net
• .org
• .app
• .dev
• .io
• .info
• .me
• .com.au
• .com.br
• .africa
• .de
• .fr
• .im
• .lv
• .no
• .pl
• .se
• .ua

Caveats

WHOIS records are not a true standard, and they are first and foremost intended for humans to interpret. Each TLD may return records in a slightly different format, and even where the format is consistent, registrars may offer privacy protection for contact information and addresses.

For some TLDs (especially country-specific TLDs in the European Union), most WHOIS information is considered private, and the respective WHOIS servers will return limited information, or even none at all (resulting in {:error, :no_data_provided}). For this reason, it's not always possible to distinguish between cases where the domain is registered (but our WHOIS queries are blocked), versus cases where the domain is not registered at all.

The result of all this is that even when you get a success result from Whois.lookup/1, the field(s) you're interested in may be nil. In some cases this may be because we simply haven't implemented parsing for the TLD in question (.co.uk and .ac.uk are big outstanding examples of this), but more often it's simply the case that the TLD's WHOIS server doesn't offer that information.

Installation

Add whois to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:whois, "~> 0.3"},
  ]
end

Usage

With little exception, Whois.lookup/1 is the only entry point you'll care about in the library.

It will choose the appropriate WHOIS server to contact, retrieve the DNS record for your domain, and return a parsed version of it.

Note that the domain you pass in must be just a domain, without any subdomain, protocol or path. For instance, "google.com" is correct, but not "www.google.com" or https://google.com. (If you have a URL, you can use the [domainatrex][] library to extract just the domain.)

domainatrex

iex(1)> Whois.lookup("google.com")
{:ok,
 %Whois.Record{
   contacts: %{
     administrator: %Whois.Contact{
       city: "Mountain View",
       country: "US",
       email: "dns-admin@google.com",
       fax: "+1.6502530001",
       name: "Domain Administrator",
       organization: "Google LLC",
       phone: "+1.6502530000",
       state: "CA",
       street: "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,",
       zip: "94043"
     },
     registrant: %Whois.Contact{
       city: "Mountain View",
       country: "US",
       email: "dns-admin@google.com",
       fax: "+1.6502530001",
       name: "Domain Administrator",
       organization: "Google LLC",
       phone: "+1.6502530000",
       state: "CA",
       street: "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,",
       zip: "94043"
     },
     technical: %Whois.Contact{
       city: "Mountain View",
       country: "US",
       email: "dns-admin@google.com",
       fax: "+1.6502530001",
       name: "Domain Administrator",
       organization: "Google LLC",
       phone: "+1.6502530000",
       state: "CA",
       street: "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway,",
       zip: "94043"
     }
   },
   created_at: ~N[1997-09-15 00:00:00],
   domain: "google.com",
   expires_at: ~N[2020-09-14 04:00:00],
   nameservers: ["ns1.google.com", "ns2.google.com", "ns3.google.com",
    "ns4.google.com"],
   raw: "…",
   registrar: "MarkMonitor, Inc.",
   updated_at: ~N[2018-02-21 10:45:07]
 }}

Development

Preparing a PR

There are a handful of code quality checks that CI runs. To run them locally, you can use:

mix check

This does not adequately test the TCP connection to real Whois servers, because the GitHub Actions IPs are generally blocked by the servers our "live" (i.e., full end-to-end) tests rely on. Full full test coverage, you'll need to run mix test --include live locally.

Updating the list of Whois servers

The priv directory contains a Makefile that will download the latest TLD reference file from the web and parse it into a structure we can use at compile time. Run it like this:

cd priv
make clean
make tld.json
make tld.csv