dynect4r: A Ruby Library and Command Line Client for the Dynect REST API (Version 2)

Well, I should have listened to everyone who warned me about UltraDNS’s obscene prices. But I figured it’s only DNS, so how much more could they be compared to their competition? $50 per month? Maybe $100? Boy was I surprised to find out that UltraDNS’s prices are literally 10-25 times more than everyone else’s! Hilarious…

I’ve actually been a DynDNS customer since the late nineties or so (I have free custom DNS service for life for making a donation to them back when they were a much smaller company), so I had looked at Dyn.com’s products before. I just must have gotten confused with all their different websites and DNS products, because I somehow got the impression that the DynDNS API wasn’t powerful enough to do what I wanted to do. I was absolutely wrong. After having written command line clients for both APIs (see ultradns4r, and now dynectr4), I think I speak from authority when I say the Dynect API is every bit as powerful as UltraDNS’s. And at 1/10th - 1/25th the cost of UltraDNS, going with Dynect is a no-brainer. But I’ve digressed long enough.

I wrote dynect4r for the same reason I wrote ultradns4r; I wanted to be able to manage all my DNS records via the command line. And now that I’ve learned how to package Ruby projects as gems, you can simply…

                      gem install dynect4r
                      

and then do things like…

                      dynect4r-client -n test.example.org 1.1.1.1
                      

Since the key feature of this project is the command line client, the actual library behind it is a pretty simple wrapper around rest-client. If you’re looking for something a bit more powerful to use in your own Ruby projects, you may be interested in dynect_rest by Adam Jacob from Opscode. We actually discovered each other’s projects last night in #chef, and realized that it would probably be a good idea to pool our efforts eventually.