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bestwhois - a command-line whois-like client for the WHOIS and WHOIS History APIs by WhoisXML API Inc.

About

The ‘bestwhois’ command-line utility make queries through the API service provided by WhoisXML API, Inc. It is intended as a replacement of the standard ‘whois’ command for domain and IP WHOIS queries, to provide accurate queries from our WHOIS database via the WHOIS API (https://whoisapi.whoisxmlapi.com). In addition it can yield historic WHOIS records for domains by invoking the WHOIS history API (https://whois-history-api.whoisxmlapi.com).

By default it gives a pretty-printed human-readable JSON output, which is at least as readable and definitely more structured as the standard textual output of WHOIS. Optionally it can also print a textual output which is closer to usual WHOIS.

The use of the utility requires a subscription to the Whois API, see its details at https://whoisxmlapi.com. A free subscription is also available.

Installation

Prerequisites

  • The program is written in series 3 Python, so it has to be installed

on your system to run. It has been tested with version >= 3.6.

  • It depends also on the pygments, argparse, and requests packages. You may install these with the package manager of your OS (e.g. apt), or using Python’s package manager, ‘pip’, by doing
pip3 install pygments argparse requests

in your shell or Windows command line. If you want to query for domains with national characters with Unicode encoding, you also need the idna package:

pip3 install idna

Running the program

Windows users have to rename the file “bestwhois” to “bestwhois.py”

move bestwhois bestwhois.py

and use it as bestwhois.py. When first running, it has to associated with Python in this environment.

Apart from this, all you need is a valid API key which can be obtained after registration. You may specify this for the program in various ways:

  • With the –api-key= command-line option
  • Writing the API key single-line into a text file (named rc file in what follows), and specifying the location with the –rcfile= option
  • Naming the rc file “.bestwhoisrc”, and putting it to your home directory or next to the script. We recommend to withdraw read permissions from other files on this.
  • Putting the rc file to /etc/bestwhoisrc .

The program currently uses the same API key for both the WHOIS API and the WHOIS History API. If your key is not valid for either of these, an error will produced.

Quick start

Having a proper rc file, the program should simply run from command-line. You may want to put it to some location in the path, e.g. to /usr/local/bin on UNIX-flavor systems. Just try

bestwhois domainwhoisdatabase.com

(Or

bestwhois.py domainwhoisdatabase.com

on Windows).

A help is available with the –help option.

Some further examples:

  • A simple WHOIS query with text output:
bestwhois --text domainwhoisdatabase.com
  • Simple WHOIS query with raw text fields fully included:
bestwhois --fullrawtext domainwhoisdatabase.com
  • IP WHOIS query with non-colored output:
bestwhois --nocolor 104.27.154.235
  • Full history query:
bestwhois --history domainwhoisdatabase.com
  • History query with date restrictions:
bestwhois domainwhoisdatabase.com --created-date-from 2000-01-01 --expired-date-to 2020-01-01
  • Query a domain with national characters (the two lines are equivalent):
bestwhois москва.рф 
bestwhois xn--80adxhks.xn--p1ai

Specifications

Command-line options

A full list of command-line options can be obtained by invoking the program with the –help option.

Note: the options marked with “(history)” in their description imply the use of the WHOIS History API instead of the WHOIS API.

Output

The output consists of parsed WHOIS records as specified by the command-line options. The default is a colorized JSON-like text. On Windows consoles, coloring is not supported.

If there are no WHOIS records in the output of the API, the output of the API is printed.

Return codes

0
Normal termination.
1
Error in the API call. Typical reasons: bad API key, nonexistent domain name in the History API.
2
No WHOIS records in the reply.
3
Tried to query a domain with Unicode national characters and the idna package is not installed.