When I last needed this in 2020 all gTLDs supported RDAP but few ccTLDs did. Based on this deployment tracker 1/4 of ccTLDs now support it, with a further 1/4 supporting “stealth RDAP” whatever that means (the link is broken).
Of the domains I cared about, it looks like the ICANN lookup tool isn’t working for .al, .co, de, .es, .me, .ng, .rs, .se, or .us, at least. I haven’t checked many domains.
It looks like “stealth rdap” means that the ccTLD has an rdap server, but it’s not set up for autodiscoverability. One attempt to probe them found them for .de and .us, from my list above.
I’ve monitored domain expirations for a while, using whois via scripts. I’m on macOS; it has whois built-in, but nothing for rdap that I can see. Checking Debian and Ubuntu, I’m not seeing anything in packages. I’m surprised, but maybe I’m not fully awake yet and missing something blatantly obvious.
There is a CLI tool linked from the announcement, it can produce json output for easy parsing. But since it’s just HTTP and JSON it’s not hard to roll your own either:
The macOS whois comes from the FreeBSD whois that I hacked on to improve its whois server discovery and handling of referrals (and missing referrals).
Last time I looked (several years ago) I would have needed some significant support libraries in the FreeBSD base system to get whois(1) to support RDAP. IIRC libfetch could do https for me but I would have needed something for json. (edit: looks like there’s still no json parser.) It was a bit too much extra work to take on back then, but I still think it would be right for whois(1) to use both/either protocol depending on what each registry provides.
I believe the parent is pointing out that OS’s typically should have a built in support or already have chosen a package which supports domain information lookups (and have it pre-installed). E.g. whois cli. There seems to be nothing by default for RDAP yet, which is concerning for a “sunsetting” announcement.
All registrars have supported RDAP for gTLDs for years. I used to work at a registrar and we had to implement the first version of RDAP in 2020 or 2021 I think. The first RFCs were not that great and some parts were veeery bad (contacts use the jCard format which is basically vCard converted from XML to JSON, it SUCKS), I hope they improved on that.
RDAP is mandated by ICANN and ccTLDs are not under the ICANN’s jurisdiction. So it’s up to the registry of each ccTLD to decide if they want to support it and mandate registrars to implement it. Registrars can decide to enable RDAP for ccTLDs they manage but IIRC it won’t really be usable (unless you call the registrar RDAP directly) without registry support, I might be wrong
Cool, RDAP was a bit nicer to use.
When I last needed this in 2020 all gTLDs supported RDAP but few ccTLDs did. Based on this deployment tracker 1/4 of ccTLDs now support it, with a further 1/4 supporting “stealth RDAP” whatever that means (the link is broken).
https://regiops.net/sites/default/files/documents/10-ROW13-Gavin%20Brown-Stealth%20RDAP.pdf
Of the domains I cared about, it looks like the ICANN lookup tool isn’t working for .al, .co, de, .es, .me, .ng, .rs, .se, or .us, at least. I haven’t checked many domains.
It looks like “stealth rdap” means that the ccTLD has an rdap server, but it’s not set up for autodiscoverability. One attempt to probe them found them for .de and .us, from my list above.
I’ve monitored domain expirations for a while, using whois via scripts. I’m on macOS; it has whois built-in, but nothing for rdap that I can see. Checking Debian and Ubuntu, I’m not seeing anything in packages. I’m surprised, but maybe I’m not fully awake yet and missing something blatantly obvious.
There is a CLI tool linked from the announcement, it can produce json output for easy parsing. But since it’s just HTTP and JSON it’s not hard to roll your own either:
curl -s https://rdap.verisign.com/com/v1/domain/example.com|jq -r '.events[] | select(.eventAction == "expiration") | .eventDate'https://data.iana.org/rdap/dns.jsoncontains the bootstrap data where you can find the endpoints for TLDs.I guess one difficulty is that not all TLDs seem to support this yet so you might have to fall back to whois for those that don’t.
The macOS whois comes from the FreeBSD whois that I hacked on to improve its whois server discovery and handling of referrals (and missing referrals).
Last time I looked (several years ago) I would have needed some significant support libraries in the FreeBSD base system to get whois(1) to support RDAP. IIRC libfetch could do https for me but I would have needed something for json. (edit: looks like there’s still no json parser.) It was a bit too much extra work to take on back then, but I still think it would be right for whois(1) to use both/either protocol depending on what each registry provides.
I believe libucl can parse JSON, although I haven’t used it.
If using homebrew,
brew install icann-rdapwill install ICANN’s rdap client mentioned in the article.I believe the parent is pointing out that OS’s typically should have a built in support or already have chosen a package which supports domain information lookups (and have it pre-installed). E.g. whois cli. There seems to be nothing by default for RDAP yet, which is concerning for a “sunsetting” announcement.
maybe some day the whois(1) utility will redirect to RDAP data.
CLI is in Rust >_>
I wonder if this lead to another IPv6 situation?
All registrars have supported RDAP for gTLDs for years. I used to work at a registrar and we had to implement the first version of RDAP in 2020 or 2021 I think. The first RFCs were not that great and some parts were veeery bad (contacts use the jCard format which is basically vCard converted from XML to JSON, it SUCKS), I hope they improved on that.
what about ccTLDs tho? i tried a few and they didn’t work
See Gavin Brown’s slides for a survey of the state of ccTLDs last year.
RDAP is mandated by ICANN and ccTLDs are not under the ICANN’s jurisdiction. So it’s up to the registry of each ccTLD to decide if they want to support it and mandate registrars to implement it. Registrars can decide to enable RDAP for ccTLDs they manage but IIRC it won’t really be usable (unless you call the registrar RDAP directly) without registry support, I might be wrong