The easiest way to install the client is to use Packagist and Composer, the brand new package manager for PHP >= 5.3.

Clone this repository wherever you want

git clone git@github.com:robowhois/robowhois-php-client.git

download composer in the cloned directory

wget http://getcomposer.org/composer.phar

and install the needed packages

php composer.phar install

then you can use RoboWhois in your code: bare in mind that the autoloading follows the PSR-0 standard: there is an auto-generated autoloader that you can use:

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

We try to provide an efficient way to document the features of this client, but bare in mind that, given RoboWhois API can change, this doc may be updated (last revision: 08/16/2012): we strongly recommend to take a look at the tests provided by this library as they are the simplest way to get in touch with the working code.

RoboWhois objects extend the class RoboWhois\ArrayObject, used to provide a set of convenient methods for accessing data returned by the API.

Thanks to this class you are able to access objects' properties as arrays' ones:

$account = $robowhois->account();

// $account is an instance of RoboWhois\Account
echo $account['credits_remaining'];

and you can also rely on magic methods to convert those indexes in getters:

echo $account->getCreditsRemaining();

The account API is supposed to return informations about the account which is making requests to the RoboWhois webservice:

<?php

use RoboWhois\RoboWhois;
use RoboWhois\Exception;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$robowhois = new RoboWhois('INSERT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE');

try {
    $account =  $robowhois->account();

    echo $account->getCreditsRemaining();
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "The following error occurred: " . $e->getMessage();
}

Take a look at the RoboWhois\Account class to understand which attributes are available from the API.

You can take a look at the sample/account.php script provided inside this repository, or run it

php sample/account.php

The index API is supposed to return raw text/plain WHOIS records:

<?php

use RoboWhois\RoboWhois;
use RoboWhois\Exception;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$robowhois = new RoboWhois('INSERT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE');

try {
    echo $robowhois->whois('robowhois.com');
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "The following error occurred: " . $e->getMessage();
}

You can take a look at the sample/index.php script provided inside this repository, or run it

php sample/index.php

The record API is supposed to return a JSON representation of the index one:

<?php

use RoboWhois\RoboWhois;
use RoboWhois\Exception;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$robowhois = new RoboWhois('INSERT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE');

try {
    $whois = $robowhois->whoisRecord('robowhois.com');

    echo $whois['daystamp'] . "\n";
    echo $whois->getRecord();
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "The following error occurred: " . $e->getMessage();
}

You can take a look at the sample/record.php script provided inside this repository, or run it

php sample/record.php

The properties API is supposed to return the parsed WHOIS record for a domain:

<?php

use RoboWhois\RoboWhois;
use RoboWhois\Exception;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$robowhois = new RoboWhois('INSERT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE');

try {
    $domain = $robowhois->whoisProperties('robowhois.com');

    echo $domain['properties']['created_on'] . "\n";
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "The following error occurred: " . $e->getMessage();
}

You can take a look at the sample/properties.php script provided inside this repository, or run it

php sample/properties.php

The parts API is supposed to return the WHOIS record for a domain without merging the one or more responses returned by the contacted WHOIS server(s):

<?php

use RoboWhois\RoboWhois;
use RoboWhois\Exception;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$robowhois = new RoboWhois('INSERT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE');

try {
    $domain = $robowhois->whoisParts('robowhois.com');

    echo $domain['parts'][0]['body'] . "\n";
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "The following error occurred: " . $e->getMessage();
}

You can take a look at the sample/parts.php script provided inside this repository, or run it

php sample/parts.php

The availability API is supposed to give a feedback about the registration of a particular domain:

<?php

use RoboWhois\RoboWhois;
use RoboWhois\Exception;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$robowhois = new RoboWhois('INSERT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE');

try {
    $domains = array(
      'google.com', 'mycustomabsurddomainnamenooneeverregistered.ch'
    );

    foreach ($domains as $domain) {
        $availability = $robowhois->whoisAvailability($domain);

        if ($availability['available']) {
            echo sprintf("%s is available!", $domain) . "\n";
        } else {
            echo sprintf("%s is registered!", $domain) . "\n";
        }
    }
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo "The following error occurred: " . $e->getMessage();
}

There are a couple convenient methods to quickly check a domain's availability: you can use $robowhois->whoisAvailability($domain) and $robowhois->isRegistered($domain).

You can take a look at the sample/availability.php script provided inside this repository, or run it

php sample/availability.php

You can generate PHP documentation with doxygen:

doxygen docs/.dox

The client is tested with phpunit; you can run the tests, from the repository's root, by doing:

phpunit

Some tests require internet connection (to test against a real API response), so they are disabled by default; to run them add a .token file under the test directory containing your RoboWhois API key and run

phpunit test/

• Simone Carletti
• Alessandro Nadalin
• David Funaro