Check web domain availability using python-whois

In this post, I am going to show you, how you can use python to check domain availability rather to go to godaddy.com or any other domain lookup website to make this check. Oh yeah that means you can use this to find out the available domains too. Well lets get started.

First of all you need to install python-whois. You can do this using your favorite tool pip. Its just a single step.

pip install python-whois

to verify that python-whois is installed its even more easy.

python -c 'import whois'

Successful installation means you get no errors running the above command. If you get 'No module named whois' then this means you are installation wasn't successful.



Not that python-whois installed, we are ready to start using it. Lets do it by not saving in a file but opening python interactive shell and explore. To open python open terminal and hit enter after typing python. You should be in the python interactive mode

>>> import whois
>>> result=whois.whois('merosanokatha.com')
>>> 

If you saw something like this, no output at all then the domain exists. we will now see what information we can get about the domain in a while. And if you saw something like below, then that means the domain is available.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/whois/__init__.py", line 20, in whois
    return WhoisEntry.load(domain, text)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/whois/parser.py", line 101, in load
    return WhoisCom(domain, text)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/whois/parser.py", line 134, in __init__
    raise PywhoisError(text)
whois.parser.PywhoisError:
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
No match for "MEROSAPANAADHYAO.COM".

 Ok, so lets see what information is available from the existing domains

>>> result.attrs() # lists the attributes of result
>>> ['creation_date', 'domain_name', 'emails', 'expiration_date', 'name_servers', 'referral_url', 'registrar', 'status', 'updated_date', 'whois_server']
>>> result.creation_date #gets the registration date
datetime.datetime(2011, 10, 26, 0, 0)

Similary other attributes can be obtained like result.updated_date, result.expiration_date, result.whois_server, result.status and so on. For more detail information you can use result.text.

Well this is how you can use python-whois module. A small tweaking can help you obtain related unavailable domains.

Happy PyPy-ing