+++
title = "whoami"
description = "*whoami* returns your resolver's local IP address, port and transport."
weight = 44
tags = ["plugin", "whoami"]
categories = ["plugin"]
date = "2020-02-06T12:07:03.877382"
+++

## Description

The *whoami* plugin is not really that useful, but can be used for having a simple (fast) endpoint
to test clients against. When *whoami* returns a response it will have your client's IP address in
the additional section as either an A or AAAA record.

The reply always has an empty answer section. The port and transport are included in the additional
section as a SRV record, transport can be "tcp" or "udp".

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

The *whoami* plugin will respond to every A or AAAA query, regardless of the query name.

If CoreDNS can't find a Corefile on startup this is the _default_ plugin that gets loaded. As such
it can be used to check that CoreDNS is responding to queries. Other than that this plugin is of
limited use in production.

## Syntax

~~~ txt
whoami
~~~

## Examples

Start a server on the default port and load the *whoami* plugin.

~~~ corefile
example.org {
    whoami
}
~~~

When queried for "example.org A", CoreDNS will respond with:

~~~ txt
;; 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 Also

[Read the blog post][blog] on how this plugin is built, or [explore the source code][code].

[blog]: https://coredns.io/2017/03/01/how-to-add-plugins-to-coredns/
[code]: https://github.com/coredns/coredns/blob/master/plugin/whoami/