Domain Hunter is a high-performance, two-stage command-line utility and interactive search wizard designed to hunt down brandable, personal, or family domains.
The project features a modular plugin architecture that interacts with multiple registrar APIs and implements detailed, transparent error diagnostics.
Why I Built It#
Most domain searching tools either query public WHOIS servers sequentially (which is slow and quickly leads to IP blocks) or query registrar APIs directly (hitting rate limits and requiring authenticated configurations for every check).
To solve this, I designed a two-stage approach:
- Stage 1 (Parallel RDAP Sweep): Rapidly tests hundreds of candidate domain names concurrently across threaded workers using the public IANA RDAP bootstrap protocol. This filters out 90%+ of registered names without needing any API credentials or hitting registrar rate limits.
- Stage 2 (Registrar Validation Shortlist): Sends only the unregistered shortlist candidates to live registrar check endpoints (like Cloudflare Registrar, Namecheap, or NameSilo) to confirm retail availability, identify premium domains, and fetch price estimates.
Technical Highlights#
- Modular Provider Framework: Architected using a clean plugin system where new registrars are registered by subclassing a base
RegistrarProvider. Supports Cloudflare, Namecheap, and NameSilo. - Transparent API Diagnostics: Decodes and inspects HTTP error payloads from registrars to isolate authentication issues (
AUTH_ERROR), token scope/permission mismatches (PERMISSION_ERROR), and rate limit throttling (THROTTLED). - Weighted Scoring Engine: Ranks generated domains using custom keyword combination patterns, word count limitations, length penalties, and TLD weights (including a specialized
--family-modefavoring.organd.net). - ASCII TUI Wizard: Includes an interactive console-guided wizard (
domain_wizard.py) with preset filters for quick, normal, or deep sweeps.
Repository#
The code is hosted on GitHub: