Dinahosting DNS for libdns

This package implements the libdns interfaces for the Dinahosting API, allowing you to manage DNS records for your domains.

Compatible with libdns v1.x (the provider returns the RR-type-specific structs defined by libdns, such as libdns.Address, libdns.TXT and libdns.CNAME).

Supported record types

This package was primarily written to be used as a Caddy plugin for solving ACME challenges and adding dynamic DNS capabilities. The following record types are supported for writes (AppendRecords, SetRecords, DeleteRecords):

• A
• AAAA
• TXT
• CNAME

GetRecords also returns any other record types present in the zone (MX, SRV, URL, FRAME, SPF, ANAME, ...) as opaque libdns.RR values so callers can still enumerate them.

Authenticating

Dinahosting does not provide API keys, so you need to use the username and password of your panel account.

Reliability in production

The Dinahosting API is noticeably slow — a single zone-modifying request can take 10–30 seconds to return — and occasional upstream failures (HTTP 5xx, TCP resets, DNS hiccups) can surface as transient errors. To make the provider safe for automated flows such as ACME renewals, the provider:

• Uses a per-request HTTP timeout of 45 seconds by default.
• Retries up to 3 times with exponential backoff (1s, 2s, 4s) on transport-level errors (connection refused, EOF, timeouts…) and on HTTP 5xx responses.
• Does not retry on HTTP 200 responses that carry a business-logic error (Dinahosting's responseCode field): those errors are deterministic and retrying would only amplify load.
• Respects the caller's context.Context — if the context is cancelled during a backoff sleep, the call returns immediately with ctx.Err().

Callers that need a custom transport (proxy, custom TLS, their own retry layer, tracing, etc.) can inject their own http.Client:

p := &dinahosting.Provider{
    Username:   "YOUR_USERNAME",
    Password:   "YOUR_PASSWORD",
    HTTPClient: myCustomClient, // optional
}

Testing

The test suite has two parts:

• Unit tests for the HTTP retry logic, which run without credentials against an in-process httptest server.
• Integration tests that talk to the real Dinahosting API. They create and delete fixture records on a zone you own, and clean up after themselves.

To enable the integration tests edit the constants at the top of provider_test.go:

const (
    username = "YOUR_USERNAME"
    password = "YOUR_PASSWORD"
    zone     = "example.com"
)

Then run:

go test -v ./...

The integration tests skip themselves automatically when password is left at its default placeholder, so the suite is safe to run in CI without credentials. Because each API call takes several seconds, a full live run currently takes ~6 minutes.

Example usage

package main

import (
    "context"

    "github.com/libdns/libdns"
    "github.com/plorenzo/libdns-dinahosting"
)

func main() {
    p := &dinahosting.Provider{
        Username: "YOUR_USERNAME",
        Password: "YOUR_PASSWORD",
    }

    _, err := p.AppendRecords(context.Background(), "example.org.", []libdns.Record{
        libdns.TXT{
            Name: "_acme-challenge",
            Text: "123456",
        },
    })
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
}