The
  Registration
  Data
  Access
  Protocol

Introduction

The Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) is the successor protocol to the Whois protocol. It was first ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in March 2015 by their WEIRDS working group, and initial server and client implementations were released shortly thereafter by the many Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) in June 2015.

In the years since RDAP became standardized, extensions have been added and profiles have been specified. While this is a clear sign of the success of the protocol, the amount of information spread across RFCs, IANA registries and other documents makes specification information more difficult to acquire and implementations harder to develop and deploy.

This book is intended to describe RDAP a in way the RFCs do not, and in many cases cannot describe the protocol and its ecosystem through the use of mdbook, the many mdbook plugins, annotated examples, easier to read language and references to other materials.

It is also not intended as a replacement for the RFCs and other specifications governing RDAP. However, it is intended to offer clearer text, more complete context, and more examples than one might find in the other sources. Additionally, this book will cover background, the ecosystem, and popular conventions that are not well documented in other places. This should aid users, developers and others involved in the efforts of implementing RDAP clients and servers.

Version

This book is a living document and is updated on an as-needed basis.

The version you are reading was built on Wed Aug 28 23:47:59 UTC 2024.

Contributing

Contributions to this book are welcome. See Contributing.

Copyright (C) 2024 Andrew Newton and contributors.

License

The source for this book is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.