libpsl - C library to handle the Public Suffix List

A Public Suffix List is a collection of Top Level Domains (TLDs) suffixes. TLDs include Global Top Level Domains (gTLDs) like .com and .net; Country Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) like .de and .cn; and Brand Top Level Domains like .apple and .google. Brand TLDs allows users to register their own top level domain that exist at the same level as ICANN's gTLDs. Brand TLDs are sometimes referred to as Vanity Domains.

Browsers, web clients and other user agents can use a public suffix list to:

• avoid privacy-leaking "supercookies"
• avoid privacy-leaking "super domain" certificates (see post from Jeffry Walton)
• domain highlighting parts of the domain in a user interface
• sorting domain lists by site

Libpsl...

• has built-in PSL data for fast access (DAWG/DAFSA reduces size from ~300kB to ~50kB)
• allows to load PSL data from files
• checks if a given domain is a "public suffix"
• provides immediate cookie domain verification
• finds the longest public part of a given domain
• finds the shortest private part of a given domain
• works with international domains (UTF-8 and IDNA2008 Punycode)
• is thread-safe
• handles IDNA2008 UTS#46 (if libidn2, libicu or libicucore is available)

Find more information about the Public Suffix List here.

Download the Public Suffix List here.

The original DAFSA code is from the Chromium Project.

API Documentation

You find the current API documentation here.

Code Coverage

You can view the code coverage report here.

Quick API example

#include <stdio.h>
#include <libpsl.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	const char *domain = "www.example.com";
	const char *cookie_domain = ".com";
	const psl_ctx_t *psl = psl_builtin();
	int is_public, is_acceptable;

	is_public = psl_is_public_suffix(psl, domain);
	printf("%s %s a public suffix.\n", domain, is_public ? "is" : "is not");

	is_acceptable = psl_is_cookie_domain_acceptable(psl, domain, cookie_domain);
	printf("cookie domain '%s' %s acceptable for domain '%s'.\n",
		cookie_domain, is_acceptable ? "is" : "is not", domain);

	return 0;
}

Command Line Tool

Libpsl comes with a tool 'psl' that gives you access to most of the library API via command line.

$ psl --help

prints the usage.

Convert PSL into DAFSA

The DAFSA format is a compressed representation of strings. Here we use it to reduce the whole PSL to about 32k in size.

Generate psl.dafsa from list/public_suffix_list.dat

$ src/psl-make-dafsa --output-format=binary list/public_suffix_list.dat psl.dafsa

Test the result (example)

$ tools/psl --load-psl-file psl.dafsa aeroclub.aero

License

Libpsl is made available under the terms of the MIT license.
See the LICENSE file that accompanies this distribution for the full text of the license.

src/psl-make-dafsa and src/lookup_string_in_fixed_set.c are licensed under the term written in src/LICENSE.chromium.

Building from tarball

Choose a release from https://github.com/rockdaboot/libpsl/tags an download the tarball named libpsl-{version}.tar.*. Unpack with tar xf <filename>, cd into the libsl* directory.

Build with

./configure
make
make check

Install with

sudo make install

Building from git

Download project with

	git clone --recursive https://github.com/rockdaboot/libpsl
	cd libpsl

Building with GNU autotools

Prerequisites:

• python2.7+ (for converting the PSL list)

• basic C development tools (compiler, linker, make)

• autoconf, autoconf-archive, autopoint, automake, autotools

• libtool, gettext, pkg-config

• development files for either libidn2, libicu, libicucore or libidn (the latter only offers IDNA2003)

• for building docs: gtk-doc-tools (gtkdocize)

  ./autogen.sh
  ./configure
  make
  make check
  

Building with meson

	meson builddir
	ninja -C builddir
	ninja -C builddir test

There is also an unofficial MSVC nmake build configuration in msvc/. Please see README.MSVC.md on building libpsl with Visual Studio via NMake or Meson.

Mailing List

Mailing List Archive

Mailing List

To join the mailing list send an email to

libpsl-bugs+subscribe@googlegroups.com

and follow the instructions provided by the answer mail.

Or click join.

FAQ

1. Why do releases not contain a configure script?

You possibly accidentally downloaded the "Source code" from Github, which is not what you want. The official release tarball does contain a configure script, typical name is libpsl-x.y.z.tar.gz or libpsl-x.y.z.tar.lz

There is a detailed explanation here.

2. Why is there no CMake support for building libpsl?

There is an open PR which needs polishing. Contributions are appreciated.

3. Can you update the PSL data by making a new release?

No. The idea is to keep libpsl and the PSL list independent from each other.

Either your OS updates PSL packages regularly (for example, Debian has the package publicsuffix) or you can do this yourself. Libpsl offers an API to read the PSL data in it's original form or to read a converted DAFSA blob. If you read often and update the PSL data less often, create a DAFSA blob with psl-make-dafsa. It just needs to be mapped into memory (no parsing) and allows random access. It's also much smaller than the original PSL data.