This is an ugly hack to harvest the official list of WHOIS servers from IANA for all TLDs, and build a unified whois.conf, inspired by this SuperUser question, which was prompted by the recent huge surge in new non-country TLDs.

It's also a convenience repository to hold the data when I run the script myself once in a while (the *.baseline files, especially whois.conf.baseline).

Be polite - don't run this too often (once a month is probably fine). TLDs are released or changed infrequently (though more frequently than they used to be!). Unfortunately, since at this writing the iana.org web server doesn't send Last-Modified headers, there's no way to be automatically more polite.

Share. Let me know when you notice a significant change.

This question used to have the entire list, but someone decided that an answer to the question was dynamic enough that it probably shouldn't be maintained in a Stack Exchange answer (which is somewhat fair).

Please only send pull requests for the scripts - not for the data (updates to the cache or the baselines, etc.) Run the scripts themselves for your own updates. That being said, I pushed the baselines for general use and for people who can't run these scripts themselves for some reason, so if I'm being lazy and haven't updated in a while, ping me at [email protected], and I'll update when I can.

1. Run get-iana-whois.sh

This will download IANA's master list of TLDs, and then download the page for each one. I pull the entire page to enable other kinds of analysis, but it's overkill for this purpose.

2. Run build-whois.sh

This generates output in whois.conf and jwhois.conf-compatible syntax.

3. Optionally run get-whois-ips.sh

This bonus script builds a current list of IPs used by the WHOIS servers (so that you can add them to outbound IP whitelists on your firewall, etc.)

4. Set baseline files as needed.

These scripts do not presume to know when you want to set your baseline files. You can set them in bulk with ./set-baselines.sh.

However, this repo also serves as a way for me to publish my own baselines for public reference. This should probably be separated out into a .local concept.

Some domains appear to have lost their WHOIS for some reason over time. I have not had time to investigate why for each one, so I just keep the old ones by using sdiff -o mergedfile oldfile newfile.

It would be really great if IANA would publish a current whois.conf themselves.

Note that de-facto TLDs - where users can register names, but it's more than one level deep (.co.uk, etc.) - are not currently included. Eventually, I'd like to bring in info from the Public Suffix List and merge known WHOIS info for those as well. The whois.conf and jwhois.conf files in various distros already include some of these.

Here's an example of a run where only one new TLD (.irish) was found.

$ ./get-iana-whois.sh
- Fetching latest db.html ...
- Checking for differences from last db.html fetch ...
--- db.html.baseline	2019-05-05 09:52:03.747642612 -0800
+++ db.html	2019-05-05 09:52:45.883541561 -0800
@@ -5868,6 +5868,15 @@
     <tr>
         <td>

+            <span class="domain tld"><a href="/domains/root/db/irish.html">.irish</a></span></td>
+
+        <td>generic</td>
+        <td>Binky Moon, LLC</td>
+    </tr>
+
+    <tr>
+        <td>
+
             <span class="domain tld"><a href="/domains/root/db/is.html">.is</a></span></td>

         <td>country-code</td>
- Refreshing list of TLDs ...

- Record count:
1578 tld.list

- Sample of tld.list contents:
aaa
aarp
abarth
abb
abbott

- Checking for tld.list diff vs baseline ...
--- tld.list.baseline	2019-05-05 09:52:16.679611596 -0800
+++ tld.list	2019-05-05 09:52:48.207535987 -0800
@@ -641,6 +641,7 @@
 ipiranga
 iq
 ir
+irish
 is
 iselect
 ismaili

- Fetching any new TLD pages ...
- (Note: iana.org HTTP server does not set Last-Modified headers)
................................................................
[snip]

- Note: To set tld.list baseline:
cp -p tld.list tld.list.baseline

- Generate new whois config file with:
./build-whois.sh


$ ./build-whois.sh
- Building whois.conf ...
1209 whois.conf

- Checking for differences from baseline ...
499a500
> \.irish$ whois.nic.irish

- To set baseline:
cp -p whois.conf whois.conf.baseline

- Building jwhois.conf ...
1209 jwhois.conf

- Checking for differences from baseline ...
499a500
> "\\.irish$" = "whois.nic.irish"

- To set baseline:
cp -p jwhois.conf jwhois.conf.baseline