How To Install Dig on CentOS 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the Dig on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Dig (Domain Information Groper) is handy to perform DNS lookup and investigate DNS-related issues, right from the terminal. But for some reason, it doesn’t exist on the latest version of CentOS or RHEL.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Dig on a CentOS 8.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8 Linux.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Dig on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install epel-release

Step 2. Installing Dig on CentOS 8.

Now we run the following command to install dig on the CentOS system:

sudo dnf install bind-utils

After the installation is finished, you can verify whether the package was successfully installed or not by running the below command:

dig -v

Not only dig but bind-utils also install other essential utilities such as nslookup, host, nsupdate, etc.

Step 3. Basic Examples of Dig Command Usage.

The dig syntax consists of the hostname/IP address, name, and record as follows:

dig [HOSTNAME] [NAME] [RECORD]

• To check the DNS record for a specific domain, run the command:

dig idroot.us

• You can use the dig command to find the domain’s MX (Mail Exchange) records:

dig idroot.us MX +short

• Use the utility to display the detailed SOA (Start of Authority) record:

dig idroot.us SOA

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Dig. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Dig on your CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Dig website.