Tldx – CLI tool for fast domain name discovery

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!

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.

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.

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)

The core problem: The good old days of easy domain hunting are long gone...

    #!/bin/sh

    echo "Don't bother, all the good names have been taken"

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...

What’s the difference between

https://github.com/brandonyoungdev/tldx?tab=readme-ov-file#t...

and

https://github.com/brandonyoungdev/tldx?tab=readme-ov-file#t...