PHP-DNS: A DNS Abstraction in PHP

Use Cases

This library might be for you if:

• You want to be able to query DNS records locally or over HTTPS
• You want observability into your DNS lookups
• You want something easy to test / mock in your implementation
• You want to try several different sources of DNS truth
• You want to easily extend it or contribute to get more behavior you want!

Installation

composer require remotelyliving/php-dns

Usage

Basic Resolvers can be found in src/Resolvers

These resolvers at the least implement the Resolvers\Interfaces\DNSQuery interface

• GoogleDNS (uses the GoogleDNS DNS over HTTPS API)
• CloudFlare (uses the CloudFlare DNS over HTTPS API)
• LocalSystem (uses the local PHP dns query function)
• Dig (Can use a specific nameserver per instance but requires the host OS to have dig installed). Based on Spatie DNS

$resolver = new Resolvers\GoogleDNS();

// can query via convenience methods
$records = $resolver->getARecords('google.com'); // returns a collection of DNS A Records

// can also query by any RecordType.
$moreRecords = $resolver->getRecords($hostname, DNSRecordType::TYPE_AAAA);

// can query to see if any resolvers find a record or type.
$resolver->hasRecordType($hostname, $type) // true | false
$resolver->hasRecord($record) // true | false

// This becomes very powerful when used with the Chain Resolver

Chain Resolver

The Chain Resolver can be used to read through DNS Resolvers until an answer is found. Whichever you pass in first is the first Resolver it tries in the call sequence. It implements the same DNSQuery interface as the other resolvers but with an additional feature set found in the Chain interface.

So something like:

$chainResolver = new Chain($cloudFlareResolver, $googleDNSResolver, $localDNSResolver);

That will call the GoogleDNS Resolver first, if no answer is found it will continue on to the LocalSystem Resolver. The default call through strategy is First to Find aka Resolvers\Interfaces\Chain::withFirstResults(): Chain

You can randomly select which Resolver in the chain it tries first too via Resolvers\Interfaces\Chain::randomly(): Chain Example:

$foundRecord = $chainResolver->randomly()->getARecords('facebook.com')->pickFirst();

The above code calls through the resolvers randomly until it finds any non empty answer or has exhausted order the chain.

Lastly, and most expensively, there is Resolvers\Interfaces\Chain::withAllResults(): Chain and Resolvers\Interfaces\Chain::withConsensusResults(): Chain All results will be a merge from all the different sources, useful if you want to see what all is out there. Consensus results will be only the results in common from source to source.

src/Resolvers/Interfaces

// returns the first non empty result set
$chainResolver->withFirstResults()->getARecords('facebook.com'); 

// returns the first non empty result set from a randomly selected resolver
$chainResolver->randomly()->getARecords('facebook.com'); 

// returns only common results between resolvers
$chainResolver->withConsensusResults()->getARecords('facebook.com'); 

// returns all collective responses with duplicates filtered out
$chainResolver->withAllResults()->getARecords('facebook.com'); 

Cached Resolver

If you use a PSR6 cache implementation, feel free to wrap whatever Resolver you want to use in the Cached Resolver. It will take in the the lowest TTL of the record(s) and use that as the cache TTL. You may override that behavior by setting a cache TTL in the constructor.

$cachedResolver = new Resolvers\Cached($cache, $resolverOfChoice);
$cachedResolver->getRecords('facebook.com'); // get from cache if possible or falls back to the wrapped resolver and caches the returned records

If you do not wish to cache empty result answers, you may call through with this additional option:

$cachedResolver->withEmptyResultCachingDisabled()->getARecords('facebook.com');

Entities

Take a look in the src/Entities to see what's available for you to query by and receive.

For records with extra type data, like SOA, TXT, MX, CNAME, and NS there is a data attribute on Entities\DNSRecord that will be set with the proper type.

Reverse Lookup

This is offered via a separate ReverseDNSQuery interface as it is not common or available for every type of DNS Resolver. Only the LocalSystem Resolver implements it.

Observability

All provided resolvers have the ability to add subscribers and listeners. They are directly compatible with symfony/event-dispatcher

All events can be found here: src/Observability/Events

With a good idea of what a subscriber can do with them here: src/Observability/Subscribers

You could decide where you want to stream the events whether its to a log or somewhere else. The events are all safe to json_encode() without extra parsing.

If you want to see how easy it is to wire all this up, check out the repl bootstrap

Logging

All provided resolvers implement Psr\Log\LoggerAwareInterface and have a default NullLogger set at runtime.

Tinkering

Take a look in the Makefile for all the things you can do!

There is a very basic REPL implementation that wires up some Resolvers for you already and pipes events to sterr and stdout

make repl

christians-mbp:php-dns chthomas$ make repl
Psy Shell v0.9.9 (PHP 7.2.8 — cli) by Justin Hileman
>>> ls
Variables: $cachedResolver, $chainResolver, $cloudFlareResolver, $googleDNSResolver, $IOSubscriber, $localSystemResolver, $stdErr, $stdOut
>>> $records = $chainResolver->getARecords('facebook.com')
{
    "dns.query.profiled": {
        "elapsedSeconds": 0.21915197372436523,
        "transactionName": "CloudFlare:facebook.com.:A",
        "peakMemoryUsage": 9517288
    }
}
{
    "dns.queried": {
        "resolver": "CloudFlare",
        "hostname": "facebook.com.",
        "type": "A",
        "records": [
            {
                "hostname": "facebook.com.",
                "type": "A",
                "TTL": 224,
                "class": "IN",
                "IPAddress": "31.13.71.36"
            }
        ],
        "empty": false
    }
}
=> RemotelyLiving\PHPDNS\Entities\DNSRecordCollection {#2370}
>>> $records->pickFirst()->toArray()
=> [
     "hostname" => "facebook.com.",
     "type" => "A",
     "TTL" => 224,
     "class" => "IN",
     "IPAddress" => "31.13.71.36",
   ]
>>> $records = $chainResolver->withConsensusResults()->getRecords('facebook.com', 'TXT')
{
    "dns.query.profiled": {
        "elapsedSeconds": 0.023031949996948242,
        "transactionName": "CloudFlare:facebook.com.:TXT",
        "peakMemoryUsage": 9615080
    }
}
{
    "dns.queried": {
        "resolver": "CloudFlare",
        "hostname": "facebook.com.",
        "type": "TXT",
        "records": [
            {
                "hostname": "facebook.com.",
                "type": "TXT",
                "TTL": 9136,
                "class": "IN",
                "data": "v=spf1 redirect=_spf.facebook.com"
            }
        ],
        "empty": false
    }
}
{
    "dns.query.profiled": {
        "elapsedSeconds": 0.23299598693847656,
        "transactionName": "GoogleDNS:facebook.com.:TXT",
        "peakMemoryUsage": 9615080
    }
}
{
    "dns.queried": {
        "resolver": "GoogleDNS",
        "hostname": "facebook.com.",
        "type": "TXT",
        "records": [
            {
                "hostname": "facebook.com.",
                "type": "TXT",
                "TTL": 21121,
                "class": "IN",
                "data": "v=spf1 redirect=_spf.facebook.com"
            }
        ],
        "empty": false
    }
}
{
    "dns.query.profiled": {
        "elapsedSeconds": 0.0018258094787597656,
        "transactionName": "LocalSystem:facebook.com.:TXT",
        "peakMemoryUsage": 9615080
    }
}
{
    "dns.queried": {
        "resolver": "LocalSystem",
        "hostname": "facebook.com.",
        "type": "TXT",
        "records": [
            {
                "hostname": "facebook.com.",
                "type": "TXT",
                "TTL": 25982,
                "class": "IN",
                "data": "v=spf1 redirect=_spf.facebook.com"
            }
        ],
        "empty": false
    }
}
=> RemotelyLiving\PHPDNS\Entities\DNSRecordCollection {#2413}
>>> $records->pickFirst()->getData()->getValue()
=> "v=spf1 redirect=_spf.facebook.com"
>>>