p2whois - RESTful Proxy to Prefix WhoIs

The p2whois package lets browser-based clients query ip addresses on Prefix WhoIs, a.k.a. pwhois. Prefix WhoIs provides useful GeoIP and IP routing information, however, its interface uses the whois protocol which is not available in browsers. So here is p2whois, a WSGI application that serves as a RESTful proxy between the web client and the pwhois whois server. p2whois accepts a query via an HTTP GET request, queries a pwhois server, and returns the pwhoise response formatted JSON-RPC style.

Please note that I'm not affiliated with Prefix WhoIs, I'm just a happy user of their service. To use p2whois you must comply with the license terms of Prefix WhoIs, which can be found in their web site.

By default pwhois queries the whois server whose address is whois.pwhois.org, which is supposed to be routed to the nearest pwhois mirror. You can change the whois server address by calling the conf function as described below.

A demo p2whois server is currently deployed at https://p2whois-avnr.rhcloud.com (accesible ONLY via The Demo Page). This server is NOT configured for production purposes and its CORS policy will prevent queries from all domains except the demo page. See more about CORS below. The p2whois package has an example directory with the demo web page that queries the demo p2whois. View this demo page here .

The p2whois server will answer two types of queries:

• An empty query such as https://my-p2whois-server.com will infer the caller's ip address from the HTTP headers and will provide the pwhois data for that address.

• A path in the format of an ip address such as https://my-p2whois-server.com/123.123.123.123 will query the pwhois data for the requested address.

The result of the query is returned in a JSON-RPC-like format, i.e., as the object of a "result" member in a JSON object. For example, https://p2whois-avnr.rhcloud.com/4.4.4.4 returns (after formatting for readability):

{
    "result": {
        "City": "Broomfield",
        "Longitude": "-105.106477",
        "IP": "4.4.4.4",
        "Region": "Colorado",
        "Country": "United States",
        "Latitude": "39.882822",
        "Prefix": "4.0.0.0/9",
        "Country-Code": "US",
        "AS-Path": "3277 39710 9002 3356",
        "Origin-AS": "3356",
        "Net-Name": "LVLT-STATIC-4-4-16",
        "AS-Org-Name": "Level 3 Communications, Inc.",
        "Cache-Date": "1449492477",
        "Org-Name": "Level 3 Communications, Inc."
    }
}

If an error occurs, the error code will be returned as both an HTTP status code and as a JSON-RPC error in the response body as a member of an "error" member. The possible error codes are:

• 403 ACCESS FORBIDDEN - request cannot be served due to CORS restrictions, see more below.

• 404 NOT FOUND - a request was made for a misformed address, or the address is reserved (e.g., 127.0.0.1).

CORS

In order to prevent leeching of your servers running p2whois, and possibly overloading under your identity the Prefix WhoIs servers (or your pwhois servers if you run a mirror), the p2whois application implements a CORS policy. The policy is set in a list of origins. By default ORIGINS = [], meaning that any domain can query the p2whois server. If you set the list of origins (with the conf function as described below) to a list of specific origins (i.e., hosts and ports), only those listed origins will be served by the application. For example, [ 'http://mysite.com' ] will only serve requests that originate from http://mysite.com and will reject all other requests with a 403 HTTP status.

Note that CORS does not secure the application and does not prevent servers from querying it, only browsers.

Test Server

p2whois has a built in test server that enables you to run it directly from the command line. You can run it directly:

$ python p2whois.py

or, if it is on the modules path (e.g., if it was installed by pip):

$ python -m p2whois

The test server listens by default on a port 8043, and can then be reached from a browser at http://localhost:8043.

Installation and Use

You have several options for installing p2whois:

• Copy the file p2whois.py to your project. It is just a single file with no dependencies. Or,

• Install using pip install p2whois. Or,

• Clone the project from GitHub - git clone https://github.com/avnr/p2whois.

Requires Python3. Import with import p2whois, and call p2whois.application from your preferred WSGI server.

To change the default settings use the conf function:

import p2whois

p2whois.conf(
    origins = [
        'http://mywebhost.com', 'http://www.mywebhost.com',
        'https://mywebhost.com', 'https://www.mywebhost.com' ],
    pwhois_server = 'pwhois.mymirror.net',
    pwhois_port = 4300 )

...
srv = make_server( '0.0.0.0', 80, p2whois.application )

All arguments of the conf function are optional. THE Conf FUNCTION IS NOT THREAD-SAFE, CALL IT BEFORE FIRING THE FIRST THREAD.

License

MIT License

The returned data is subject to the pwhois license.