Whois with JavaScript

Question

I want to be able to get whois data (and idn domains too) by client-side javascript. Is it possible? Maybe some free REST-like WhoIs service exists?

Answer 1

Try using http://whoisxmlapi.com service.

The service URL: http://www.whoisxmlapi.com/whoisserver/WhoisService

You need to specify outputFormat=json and domainName=insert_domain_here parameters..

Example URL: http://www.whoisxmlapi.com/whoisserver/WhoisService?outputFormat=json&domainName=stackoverflow.com.

Example code (using jQuery to simplify AJAX communication):

$.ajax({
  url: 'http://www.whoisxmlapi.com/whoisserver/WhoisService',
  dataType: 'jsonp',
  data: {
    domainName: 'stackoverflow.com',
    outputFormat: 'json'
  },
  success: function(data) {
    console.log(data.WhoisRecord);
  }
});

HERE is the working code.

Update:

The service mentioned above is not free, but there are several free whois services that are providing HTML output and by using YQL you can retrieve the HTML as a JS. See THIS answer for more details.

Example (using jQuery & jquery.xdomainajax):

var domain = 'stackoverflow.com';
$.ajax({
  url: 'http://whois.webhosting.info/' + domain,
  type: 'GET',
  success: function(res) {
    // using jQuery to find table with class "body_text" and appending it to a page
    $(res.responseText).find('table.body_text').appendTo('body');
  }
});

HERE is the working code.

You need to have a look at the structure of the HTML document and select, process and display the data you are interested in. The example is just printing whole table without any processing.

Answer 2

What you can do if you have exec() enabled in php is create a php file with the following:

exec('whois domain.com');

and then create aa .ajax() request to the php script where you pass the domain name and output it.

Answer 3

i'm also trying to find out a free whois provider with JSON output, couldn't find one. But, there are WHOIS windows client provided by Microsoft and like someone mentioned above, we can use PHP/cgi to get the details.

I'm not sure whether there's any WHOIS lookup/query provider gives JSON output at free cost.

BTW, i just found this phpWhois from sourceforge.net, would be a good starting point to use whois from the server. This is the library used by RoboWhois / RubyWhois provider as well.

Answer 4

An npm package called node-whois did the job for me. It's server side JS, not client side, but perhaps this will help someone.