DomainTool's Official Python API

Installing the DomainTool's API

To install the API run

pip install domaintools_api --upgrade

Ideally, within a virtual environment.

Using the API

To start out create an instance of the API - passing in your credentials

from domaintools import API


api = API(USER_NAME, KEY)

Every API endpoint is then exposed as a method on the API object, with any parameters that should be passed into that endpoint being passed in as method arguments:

api.domain_search('google', exclude='photos')

You can get an overview of every endpoint that you can interact with using the builtin help function:

help(api)

If applicable, native Python looping can be used directly to loop through any results:

for result in api.domain_search('google', exclude='photos'):
    print(result['sld'])

You can also use a context manager to ensure processing on the results only occurs if the request is successfully made:

with api.domain_search('google', exclude='photos') as results:
    print(results)

For API calls where a single item is expected to be returned, you can directly interact with the result:

profile = api.domain_profile('google.com')
title = profile['website_data']['title']

For any API call where a single type of data is expected you can directly cast to the desired type:

float(api.reputation('google.com')) == 0.0
int(api.reputation('google.com')) == 0

The entire structure returned from DomainTools can be retrieved by doing .data() while just the actionable response information can be retrieved by doing .response():

api.domain_search('google').data() == {'response': { ... }}
api.domain_search('google').response() == { ... }

You can directly get the html, xml, or json version of the response by calling .(html|xml|json)():

html = str(api.domain_search('google').json())
xml = str(api.domain_search('google').xml())
html = str(api.domain_search('google').html())

If any API call is unsuccesfull, one of the exceptions defined in domaintools.exceptions will be raised:

api.domain_profile('notvalid').data()


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
BadRequestException                       Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-3-f9e22e2cf09d> in <module>()
----> 1 api.domain_profile('google').data()

/home/tcrosley/projects/external/python_api/venv/lib/python3.5/site-packages/domaintools-0.0.1-py3.5.egg/domaintools/base_results.py in data(self)
     25                 self.api._request_session = Session()
     26             results = self.api._request_session.get(self.url, params=self.kwargs)
---> 27             self.status = results.status_code
     28             if self.kwargs.get('format', 'json') == 'json':
     29                 self._data = results.json()

/home/tcrosley/projects/external/python_api/venv/lib/python3.5/site-packages/domaintools-0.0.1-py3.5.egg/domaintools/base_results.py in status(self, code)
     44
     45         elif code == 400:
---> 46             raise BadRequestException()
     47         elif code == 403:
     48             raise NotAuthorizedException()

BadRequestException:

the exception will contain the status code and the reason for the exception:

try:
    api.domain_profile('notvalid').data()
except Exception as e:
    assert e.code == 400
    assert 'We could not understand your request' in e.reason['error']['message']

You can get the status code of a response outside of exception handling by doing .status:

api.domain_profile('google.com').status == 200

Using the API Asynchronously

If you are running on Python 3.5+ the DomainTool's API automatically supports async usage:

search_results = await api.domain_search('google')

There is built-in support for async context managers:

async with api.domain_search('google') as search_results:
    # do things

And direct async for loops:

async for result in api.domain_search('google'):
    print(result)

All async operations can safely be intermixed with non async ones - with optimal performance achieved if the async call is done first:

profile = api.domain_profile('google.com')
await profile
title = profile['website_data']['title']

Interacting with the API via the command line client

Immediately after installing domaintools_api with pip, a domaintools command line client will become available to you:

domaintools --help

To use - simply pass in the api_call you would like to make along with the parameters that it takes and your credentials:

domaintools domain_search google --max_length 10 -u $TEST_USER -k $TEST_KEY

Optionally, you can specify the desired format (html, xml, json, or list) of the results:

domaintools domain_search google --max_length 10 -u $TEST_USER -k $TEST_KEY -f html

To avoid having to type in your API key repeatedly, you can specify them in ~/.dtapi separated by a new line:

API_USER
API_KEY