Tldx – CLI tool for fast domain name discovery

(github.com)

90 points | by Brandutchmen 195 days ago

7 comments

  • Brandutchmen 195 days ago
    I’m always building small tools for myself that end up buried in private repos. I figured it was time to start sharing a few that others might find useful.

    Just published tldx, a CLI tool I use to quickly check if a domain name is available across a bunch of TLDs and variations.

    Hopefully, some of you CLI enthusiasts can find it useful!

    • cranberryturkey 195 days ago
      need --suggest "..." --max 100
      • Brandutchmen 195 days ago
        I'm wanting to add something like this.

        Besides length, what would you think would be a good way to sort suggestions here?

        • cranberryturkey 195 days ago
          just alphabetically easier to read imo
          • Brandutchmen 195 days ago
            good suggestion

            Currently, it just streams out whichever whois servers respond first. Sorting is a good improvement!

            • cranberryturkey 195 days ago
              Agreed. I’d provide two lists both sorted. First a list of taken then a list of available.
              • Brandutchmen 195 days ago
                I wonder if it'll be good to go from a line-by-line print to an actual TUI. That'd make sorting + dynamically inserting new domains make sense
                • dayjah 195 days ago
                  Great tool! Prior me is sad this didn’t exist!

                  I’d be fine with a live summary status updating showing # available and # taken. Hitting ctrl+c resulting in printing the lists as above.

                  Also perhaps a —timeout flag, or similar as I may only want to wait 5 minutes / length of time it takes to steep tea for answers.

                • cranberryturkey 195 days ago
                  i'd rather be able to pipe the results to a domains.txt file to be honest.
  • noperator 195 days ago
    You can also use https://github.com/noperator/raink to brainstorm TLDs that are relevant to some topic you care about. For example:

        curl -s https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt |
            raink -f /dev/stdin -p 'which of these TLDs is most related to the concept of "hacking"?' |
            jq -r 'map(.value)[:10]'
        
        [
          "BLACK",
          "COMSEC",
          "TOOLS",
          "SECURITY",
          "ZERO",
          "EXPOSED",
          "FORUM",
          "SHELL",
          "BOT",
          "SOFTWARE"
        ]
    
    Those are all in the IANA list but not all can be registered—just showing as PoC. See https://bishopfox.com/blog/raink-llms-document-ranking for more background.
    • noitpmeder 194 days ago
      Are you the creator of that project?
      • Brandutchmen 194 days ago
        I'd assume so? Usernames on HN and GitHub match?
  • a_dabbler 195 days ago
    You should consider adding DNS checks prior to WHOIS. Whois is unreliable and you can be quickly blocked, doing a quick SOA DNS request can help reduce your WHOIS queries when the domain definitely exists (no SOA is not enough to confirm domain is unregistered but existing SOA is enough to confirm a domain is registered)
  • cb321 195 days ago
    Since identifier bike shedding is more broad than only top-level domain names, readers interested in a tool like this might also be interested in https://github.com/c-blake/thes - a command-line thesaurus utility written in Nim and organized around the Moby Thesaurus format. An example usage might be:

        $ thes -n5 lofty
        airy    gaudy   high   showy  brand  sound
        big     grand   lurid  steep  clear  valid
        erect   grave   noble  tall   lucid  logo
        fancy   great   proud  tony   regal
    
    Observant readers might notice 3 banks of alphabetic sorting for the 3 kinds of synonyms - reciprocal/reflected (airy..tony), defined but irreciprocal (brand..valid), and wilder made-up names/phrases someone got into Moby (just logo in this example). These can be configured to show up in 3 distinct terminal colors.

    Besides the prefix/suffix ideas of `tldx` in TFA, "synonymity" could also be incorporated, but you might need a higher quality source of such than Moby which has kind of a "big tent" aspect to its synonym lists.

  • dedicate 195 days ago
    The core problem: The good old days of easy domain hunting are long gone...
    • amelius 195 days ago
      My version of the tool:

          #!/bin/sh
      
          echo "Don't bother, all the good names have been taken"
    • akoculu 195 days ago
      I just got some good domains like mitte.ai and told.so a few months ago
    • Brandutchmen 195 days ago
      I agree. That's why I love using a permutation tool like this. It has had some surprising finds so far.

      Though it's still a cope for the real problem of domain squatting.

  • akoculu 195 days ago
    installation fails for me

    λ brew tap brandonyoungdev/tldx λ brew install tldx

    ==> Fetching brandonyoungdev/tldx/tldx ==> Downloading https://github.com/brandonyoungdev/tldx/releases/download/ curl: (56) The requested URL returned error: 404

    Error: tldx: Failed to download resource "tldx" Download failed: https://github.com/brandonyoungdev/tldx/releases/download/v1...

  • croes 195 days ago
    • phinnaeus 195 days ago
      Surely just a typo in the readme
      • Brandutchmen 195 days ago
        Yep! There's supposed to be two examples there... Fixed now :)
    • Brandutchmen 195 days ago
      Good eye.

      Fixed now :)