go-njalla-dns-scraper

README

Deprecated: https://github.com/Sighery/gonjalla

Njalla has since released an official API which renders this code obsolete and overly complex. Head over to https://github.com/Sighery/gonjalla for a Golang package based on the official API, and to help implement more methods.

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go-njalla-dns-scraper

Go program to scrape, and offer an API for Njalla's DNS records configuration interface.

Njalla is a privacy-aware domain service. I've recently started to use it and I quite like them. However, they don't currently provide any official API to interface with domains' DNS records.

This is useful (and maybe even needed) for when you want to set up things like Let's Encrypt SSL certificates with maybe Certbot. These certificates are short-lived, for now three months, as they explain and cover in their FAQ. They also mention that if it wasn't for many DNS provides not offering programmatic ways to update DNS records (which is needed for one of the ways of setting and renewing SSL certificates), they'd make them even more short-lived.

One way of verifying domain ownership, and getting the SSL certificates, is to set DNS TXT records with given codes generated by Let's Encrypt/Certbot. Alternatively, you can also use HTTP to verify the domain ownership, but this doesn't work (or it requires more work, rather) for wildcard SSL certificates, which are used to issue SSL certificates to the main domain and all its subdomains.

Certbot is used to automate all this work. It has plugins that integrate with other DNS providers and take care of both setting the initial SSL certificate, and then renewing them with the help of a CRON schedule.

However, since Njalla doesn't provide an API, and it doesn't implement RFC 2136, there's currently no way to programmatically add, update, and remove DNS records so I could automate all this work.

Credits

Even though Njalla doesn't currently provide an official API, there's a NodeJS package that scrapes Njalla's website and exposes an API. I've shamelessly copied most of the code logic when porting it over to Go here. My utmost thanks to @romualdr for doing all the work of going through the Njalla website, figuring out how it works, and translating all the needed requests for the API into code. I can quickly progress in this port only because they've already done all that time-consuming research work.

Motivations and Reasoning

A big motivator for this is because I'm lazy and I want to automate renewing the SSL certificates. However, why Go?

I don't know Go. I believe this will become clear to anyone who just glances at the current code. And the NodeJS package works (mostly) just fine. So why would I decide to reinvent the wheel, on a language I don't know?

That is because I want to have my infrastructure as code, managed by some infrastructure-as-code tool like Terraform. For now I'm leaning towards using Terraform, which allows you to create your own providers that then you can use in your Terraform infrastructure code. Only catch is that Terraform is written in Go, and therefore the providers must be written in Go as well.

Issues and Missing Features

I've already achieved parity with the NodeJS version. It's currently somewhat of a library as well. The current code is not pretty. It makes use of quite a few hacks because I don't know Go, and I don't know how to do some dynamic changes I need in a static way that Go will like.

Currently there's also no CLI client. Although I plan on adding, or trying to, add one soon enough.