In the spirit of John making things, I’ve recently turned my gaze on the unnecessarily long list of domain names that I’ve collected over the years. I’ve moved between several different registrars at different times in the last 15 or so years, and have even spread out some domains in different places depending on the specific pricing and availability of non-standard TLDs like .be (for snpt.be, which was to be the url shortener for sniptube.com, a YouTube video concatenating site that I never actually launched).
The problem with having so many domains in so many different places is its hard to actually see what you have, and when they expire. The only time you really notice is when the registrar notifies you its up for renewal, and even then I may not pay attention because everything autorenews anyways.
As is my way, my attempt to solve this ‘problem’ wasn’t to just get rid of domains I don’t need anymore, or consolidate them on a single service (which won’t work for all domains because of pricing and availability… that pesky .be domain), but instead to build yet another web app.
Enter the Registrar Registry
I took a look at the different registrars I was using and 3/5 of them had APIs that I could use to query for a list of domains and expiry dates (the other 2 registries have been put on notice, and I’ll be switching off of them as the domains reach their expiry dates). So I started up vim (a new obsession of mine), created a new node/express app, and started making api requests.
I’ve decided to call this little app the Registrar Registry, and because it gives me Domain Data I’ve nicknamed it R2D2 (Disney, please don’t sue me). It connects to 3 of my registrars, pulls down my domain data and lists it out along with expiry dates, which I’ve beautified with momentjs to give me a nice human readable timeframe of when it is set to expire (expires in 15 days, expires in 9 months).
I’ve got this all up in a private GitHub repo that I’m planning on making public very soon incase such a tool would be useful to anyone else. And I’m hoping if it is, that this “someone else” might contribute a registry API connection if they happen to use a registrar that I haven’t added support for yet.
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