quien

A better WHOIS lookup tool. Interactive TUI with tabbed views for WHOIS, DNS, mail, SSL/TLS, HTTP headers, and tech stack detection.

Install

Homebrew

brew tap retlehs/tap
brew install retlehs/tap/quien

Ubuntu / Debian

curl -fsSL https://apt.quien.dev/install.sh | sudo sh

Go

go install github.com/retlehs/quien@latest

Usage

# Interactive prompt
quien

# Domain lookup (interactive TUI)
quien example.com

# IP address lookup
quien 8.8.8.8

# JSON output
quien --json example.com

Features

• RDAP-first lookups with WHOIS fallback for broad TLD coverage
• IANA referral for automatic WHOIS server discovery
• Mail configuration audit — MX, SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and BIMI with VMC chain validation
• Tech stack detection including WordPress plugins, JS/CSS frameworks, and external services parsed from HTML
• IP lookups with reverse DNS, network info, abuse contacts, and ASN discovery via RDAP
• BGP fallback for origin ASN/prefix when RDAP does not include ASN data
• PeeringDB enrichment for ASN context (network/org, peering policy, peering locations, traffic profile, IX/facility counts)
• Automatic retry with exponential backoff on all lookups
• JSON subcommands for scripting: quien dns, quien mail, quien tls, quien http, quien stack, quien all

Tip: If you want quien to replace your default WHOIS tool, you can add an alias to your shell config:

alias whois=quien

Agent skill

Add quien as a agent skill so agents use it for domain and IP lookups:

npx skills add retlehs/quien