I’ve recently joined BlueSky to see what all the fuss is about and one of my favourite features as part of the onboarding has been the ability to set your handle as your domain. This appealed to me greatly with the whole “having a website” feeling still being exciting and new.

The setup process was straightforward. I went onto my BlueSky account, clicked to say that I had a domain I’d like to use, and then I was presented with some stuff to add as a DNS TXT record to verify ownership.

Porkbun made it easy to click through their UI and add the new record but then I wanted to check that it had updated successfully. That’s where dig comes in. It’s a handy CLI tool that is usually installed by default on macOS. To check whether the TXT record has been updated correctly we can use the following command:

dig -t TXT _atproto.benwc.dev +short

• -t TXT - Specify the type (-t) of record to query. In this case we want TXT
• _atproto.benwc.dev - This is the target for the command
• +short - Modifies the output to only return the value of the TXT record, if it exists