Today I needed to use - and install - DiG (Domain Information Groper!) on a Windows 10 box. Of course, Windows is useless when it comes to CLI tools - nslookup is past its prime and not even Windows 10 includes much by way of useful tools for DNS queries. It's shipped as part of the BIND9 DNS software from ISC.
So, let's see about DiG... Good news, everyone! - BIND9 is available for Windows, but I don't want to install the whole thing, ain't nobody got time for that. So, let's see about excerpting just the DiG executable and getting it so you can use it without specifying its full path every time, which will require setting its location in the PATH variable.
Important 2025 update! ISC stopped releasing compiled native Windows releases of BIND9 for Windows with the release of v9.17.16 (21 July 2021).
Older release ZIPs for Windows are now paywalled for Enterprise customers.
However - I have used "BIND9.16.45.x64.zip" for quite a while; I upgraded to v9.17.15 while writing this update, which is also the most recent publicly available release including a native Windows build.
You can download v9.17.15 (or a prior version) from one of many reputable mirrors, I've included some sample links below.
- v9.17.15: https://ftp.u-strasbg.fr/unix/isc/bind9/9.17.15/BIND9.17.15.x64.zip
- v9.16.45: https://ftp.u-strasbg.fr/unix/isc/bind9/9.16.45/BIND9.16.45.x64.zip
- Or one of the many other mirrors listed online - navigate to the subfolder for the version you want, starting with the Google results:
- Github user Yamatohimemiya has also compiled 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions of v9.16.39 for Windows - including the extra "SupportPack" files you may to run it on Windows 7. お疲れ、ありがとう！
- Thanks to the many educational institutions for hosting repository mirrors!
There's quite a few guides and tutorials to installing DiG on Windows. The simplest one I found was from Websistent, who recommended downloading their own zip of DiG and its necessary DLL dependencies, dropping those into windows\system32 (urk?) and using as normal.
We can do better than that:
Click to see how simple it is!