watchmain 🦉

watchmain is a set of domain helpers that run with the help of various GitHub offerings.
The tool consists of two main components

• 🐷 Porkbun Explorer: web ui to search/filter on domains available on porkbun
• 🔎 Domain Checker: domain status checker that emails you on any registration change

The great thing about watchmain is that it runs entirely with the help of GitHub Pages and GitHub Actions!
No need to setup any infrastructure, just fork the repo and update some configs and you'll be ready to go!

I wrote the domain checker to notify me of an expiring domain (it worked, I got the domain!) and the Porkbun Explorer to try and find a vanity domain that didn't have a giant renewal fee. These ran on a VPS for a while and stood out as a perfect usecase to experiment with GitHub Actions.

👇 Check out a short demo to see how easy it is to set up!👇

Installation / Usage

1. Fork It

Fork the watchmain repository (https://github.com/nhmood/watchmain/fork)

2. Sign up for Mailgun and WhoisXMLAPI

watchmain currently relies on WhoisXMLAPI to track domain registration changes and Mailgun to send those updates to your inbox.
Both of these services have free tiers and, for regular watchmain usage, should be sufficient for continous monitoring at no cost.

3. Update the Configuration

watchmain.yml

Update the watchmain.yml configuration file.
If you plan on running these tools with GitHub actions you can leave the Mailgun and WhoisXMLAPI keys blank, they will be sourced from ENV secrets.
watchmain can also be run locally, so the API keys can be put into a config file for convenience.

Your Mailgun config should reflect the domain you used to setup your Mailgun account.

mailgun:
  api_key: "" # LEAVE BLANK IF USING GITHUB ACTIONS / ENV SECRETS
  domain: "mg.yourdomain.com"
  from: "watchmain@yourdomain.com"
  to:
    - "you@yourdomain.com"


whois:
  api_key: "" # LEAVE BLANK IF USING GITHUB ACTIONS / ENV SECRETS


domains:
  - "domainyoureallywant.com"

GitHub Pages

In order to provide the Porkbun Domain explorer, you'll need to enable GitHub Pages and point it to the docs/ directory.
Go to the settings for the repo, select the Pages option, and point the path to docs/.
NOTE - GitHub Pages are only available if the repo is public for free accounts

GitHub Secrets

The GitHub Actions workflows pull the Mailgun and WhoisXMLAPI API keys from environment variables that are set in the repo configuration.
Add the following secret names along with the associated API keys:

• MAILGUN_API_KEY
• WHOIS_API_KEY

GitHub Action Workflows

By default, the GitHub Actions for checking the domain status CheckDomainRegistration and updating the Porkbun domain list UpdatePorkbunDomains are not set to run automatically - this is to prevent accidental forks and wasted GitHub Action minutes.

To enable automatic running in GitHub Actions - simply uncomment the schedule block and configure the cron syntax for when you want the tasks to run.
You can reference the GitHub Actions Scheduling docs for the proper syntax.
We recommend the defaults of every day for the CheckDomainRegistration action and once a week for the UpdatePorkbunDomains action.

name: Check Domain Registration
on:
# UNCOMMENT THESE LINES TO ENABLE AUTOMATIC RUNS
#  schedule:
#    # 9am est
#    - cron: "0 13 * * *"
  workflow_dispatch:

4. Manually Run Actions

To validate that everything is configured properly - you can manually execute the action with the configured workflow_dispatch event trigger.
Just navigate over to the Actions tab, select the workflow you want to test, and click the Run workflow button.

You should be able to see the full run and updated status. If this is the first time running you'll see that watchmain has committed updated domain status / porkbun domain data directly into the repo!

Details

Both the Porkbun Domain Explorer as well as the Domain Status Check rely on GitHub Actions building and running the scraper/checkers, generating the associated status files, and committing that data back into the repository to store state between runs.

Porkbun Explorer

The Porkbun Explorer is simply a scraper for porkbun that stores the data in a easy to use JSON file.
The scraper generates the JSON file and commits it back into the docs/data/domains.json which is then pulled down by the static GitHub Page site running out of docs/. The frontend is incredibly simple and just uses vanilla, suboptimal, handrolled Javascript.

Domain Status Checker

The Domain Status Checker utilizes WhoisXMLAPI to get the latest whois data on the specified domains.
It stores and compares the Base64 MD5 hash between runs to determine whether the data has changed.
If a change is detected, it generates a (basic) diff between the payloads and sends an email using Mailgun