How to Install dig on Debian
It's been over 3 months since I posted about finally embracing Flatpak. This now short-lived proclamation coincided with me moving back over to Debian. Fortunately, I went into this particular distro hop in the right head space and things have stuck. So much so that I've been purging my dotfiles of Arch Linux references.
What's been really fun about this recent change is realizing just how bare bones Debian Stable is. Sure, if you install a desktop environment you could argue that it's bloated because of that. But in terms of convenience packages that are installed, I've found it to be a bit more minimal than I remember.
One such package, that I would have expected to be installed already is dig.
The DNS lookup utility, is something I use quite regularly. So much so, that I
already blogged about how to install it on Arch Linux. As a matter of
form, I felt like it deserved its own blog post as I was on a machine the other
day and couldn't remember the name of the package.
Similar to Arch Linux, the Debian package for dig isn't named dig. As dig
is a DNS utility, and BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is the common DNS
server, things are typically bundled together. And since you typically don't
have BIND running on a desktop rig, you wouldn't have those lovely packages
installed.
To get dig on your Debian system, you need to install the dnsutils package.
Said package is a meta package that links to bind9-dnsutils. BIND 9 was a
ground-up rewrite of the architecture used in BIND 4 and 8. Considering it's
been in play since Y2K, there's probably not a BIND 10 in the near term.
That said, I just stick to the meta package as such: apt install dnsutils.
You'll be advised on the meta status with a nice Note, selecting 'bind9-dnsutils' instead of 'dnsutils' and a list of all of the additional
dependencies you'll need. Once you confirm and everything is installed, you'll
have dig ready to do your DNS dirty work!