How to use CentralOps tools as APIs

Our tools at CentralOps.net were not designed with automation in mind and only produce HTML output. However, if you’re willing to work with the HTML, the tools use the same account system as our Whois API and can be seen as RESTful APIs themselves. Here’s what you need to know.

Contents

• Authentication
• Input
• Output

Authentication

To “log in” to your account when using the tools, you have three options:

1. Use the authentication API to get a cookie, then use hexillion.com versions of the tool URLs to ensure that the cookie is sent with your queries.

   When you use the authentication API, it sends a cookie in the HTTP response headers in addition to the session key it sends in the response body. If your HTTP library handles cookies automatically, you don’t have to bother with the response body—your HTTP library will send the cookie in your subsequent requests. Just remember to change the domain of the tool URLs from centralops.net to hexillion.com to ensure that the hexillion.com cookie is sent.

   For example, suppose you want to use Domain Dossier:

   https://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx?addr=example.com&dom_whois=1
   

   You can POST your credentials to the authentication API at:

   https://hexillion.com/rf/xml/1.0/whois/
   

   Then you can send your Domain Dossier queries:

   https://hexillion.com/co/DomainDossier.aspx?addr=example.com&dom_whois=1
   

   Notice that this URL is at hexillion.com.

2. Use the authentication API to get a session key, then pass the key to the CentralOps tools using a sessionKey argument. For example:

   https://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx?addr=example.com&dom_whois=1&sessionKey=54196e78f6bc9941a46fa1435c1c71a8f8de8d820006b1a9aca9229999267365
   
   

3. Send your credentials directly to the CentralOps tools using username and password arguments. For example:

   https://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx?addr=example.com&dom_whois=1&username=ExampleUser&password=s3cr3t
   

Input

To learn the input parameters for each CentralOps tool, view the HTML source of the input form. Alternatively, the “URL for this output” link at the bottom of the output provides a convenient way to see the parameters.

With each tool you can use HTTP GET or POST and provide your arguments in the usual application/x-www-form-urlencoded format.

Output

The output of each tool is HTML that you can examine by viewing source in your browser. A number of our customers have automated their requests, so we avoid making any signficant changes to the HTML to avoid breaking their systems. When we make new versions of these tools we will place them at new URLs and leave the current versions where they are now.