quien: A Better whois and Domain Intelligence Toolkit

The whois command dumps a wall of unformatted text — and even when you decode it, you’ve still only learned about registration. I built quien, a Go CLI that replaces whois with a tabbed TUI covering registration, DNS, mail authentication, certificates, HTTP, SEO, and tech stack — for any domain or IP.

You can try it without installing anything: ssh quien.sh

What it does

Run quien example.com and you get an interactive tabbed interface:

• WHOIS — registrar, dates, nameservers, contacts, with relative timestamps (“2 years ago”)
• DNS — A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT, PTR, SOA, and DNSSEC status
• Mail — MX records, SPF, DMARC, DKIM (probes common selectors), and BIMI with VMC chain validation
• SSL/TLS — certificate details, expiry with days remaining, SANs
• HTTP — response headers from the final destination after following redirects, security headers prioritized
• SEO — indexability checks (robots.txt, canonical, sitemap), on-page analysis (title, description, headings, images), structured data (JSON-LD, Open Graph, Twitter Cards), and performance hints (compression, caching, render-blocking resources)
• Stack — CMS detection, WordPress plugin detection, JS/CSS framework detection, and external services parsed from the HTML

It also handles IP addresses. quien 8.8.8.8 shows the network owner, CIDR range, abuse contact, reverse DNS, and ASN — with PeeringDB enrichment for peering policy, traffic profile, and IX/facility counts. A BGP fallback kicks in when RDAP doesn’t include ASN data.

SEO and Core Web Vitals

The SEO tab runs local checks out of the box. If you set a CrUX API key, it also pulls Core Web Vitals field data — real-user metrics from Chrome for LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, and TTFB. Each metric shows its p75 value with a good/needs-improvement/poor rating, plus an 8–25 week trend sparkline.

export QUIEN_CRUX_API_KEY=your-api-key

You can get a free key by enabling the Chrome UX Report API in the Google Cloud Console. Not all domains have field data — a site needs enough Chrome traffic to be included.

JSON output

For scripting, use --json for full output or run individual subcommands:

quien --json example.com
quien dns example.com
quien mail example.com
quien seo example.com

Available subcommands: whois, dns, mail, tls, http, seo, stack, all.

How it works

quien uses RDAP as its primary lookup protocol — it’s the modern replacement for WHOIS that returns structured JSON instead of freeform text. An IANA bootstrap file maps TLDs to their RDAP servers, covering ~1,200+ TLDs out of the box. For TLDs without RDAP, it falls back to traditional WHOIS with automatic server discovery via IANA referral.

The tech stack detection fetches the page HTML and inspects it for known patterns — WordPress is identified through signals like wp-includes, REST API links, and Gutenberg block markers.

Every lookup retries automatically with exponential backoff. The TUI is built with bubbletea and lipgloss. It auto-detects your terminal background for light/dark theming (override with QUIEN_THEME=light or QUIEN_THEME=dark).

Install

For Homebrew, APT, AUR, or Go install options, see the README on GitHub.

Or try it without installing: ssh quien.sh