COREDNS-WHOAMI(7)

💅 COREDNS-WHOAMI(7)

okay so this is one of those pages from the CoreDNS Plugins manual — yes, that's the manual name, we're folding it in right here at the top so it doesn't get lost 🎀 — and it's all about a tiny little plugin called whoami. March 2026 edition, bestie, stay with me.

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✨ NAME ✨

whoami — literally just tells you your resolver's local IP address, port, and transport. that's it. that's the whole job 🫶

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

ngl, the whoami plugin is not really that useful — the manpage said it, not me 💀 — but what it IS good for is being a simple (fast!) endpoint to test clients against. when whoami sends back a response, your client's IP address shows up in the additional section as either an A or an AAAA record. iconic behavior.

the reply always has an empty answer section. like, always. the port and transport get tucked into the additional section as an SRV record, and the transport can be "tcp" or "udp":

._<transport>.qname. 0 IN SRV 0 0 <port> .

the whoami plugin will respond to every A or AAAA query, regardless of the query name — it does not care what you asked for, it's answering anyway 💅

and here's the fun part: if CoreDNS can't find a Corefile on startup, this is the default plugin that gets loaded. so it's basically the "hello? are you alive?" plugin — you can use it to check that CoreDNS is responding to queries at all. other than that? limited use in production, fr fr. it's giving test-environment main character energy, not prod energy.

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⭐ SYNTAX ⭐

whoami

that's literally the whole syntax. no flags. no arguments. no notes. slay.

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🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

start a server on the default port and load the whoami plugin:

example.org {
    whoami
}

when you query for "example.org A", CoreDNS will respond with:

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;example.org.   IN       A

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
example.org.            0       IN      A       10.240.0.1
_udp.example.org.       0       IN      SRV     0 0 40212

see that? empty answer section, your IP chilling in the additional section, and the port (40212) + transport (udp) hanging out in the SRV record. obsessed 😭✨

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• read the blog post ⟨https://coredns.io/2017/03/01/how-to-add-plugins-to-coredns/⟩ on how this plugin is built — iykyk 🧚
• or go explore the source code ⟨https://github.com/coredns/coredns/blob/master/plugin/whoami/⟩ if you're the type who reads source for fun (respect)

heads up bestie: those two are the only SEE ALSO references, don't go looking for more, i checked 💜

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and that's the whole page! 🎀 this masterpiece comes to you from CoreDNS, dated March 2026, and it's COREDNS-WHOAMI(7) all day long. go test a client, bestie, you got this 💖✨🌸