How to validate a DNS TXT-record

Recently I’ve been using Let’s Encrypt a lot to generate SSL-certificates. Let’s Encrypt uses the ACME-protocol to validate the ownership of a DNS-record, how this works is described on their website. Since this requires me to update my DNS-records I use the nslookup command to see if the updated TXT-Records is active. This truely is very easy!

1. Open up a command prompt (cmd.exe) or PowerShell on your computer
2. Enter the following command to check for the ‘acme-challenge’-record;

nslookup -q=txt _acme-challenge.yourdomain.com

This will output something like;

And that’s it, that is all you need to do! Besides this, it is also possible to fetch all TXT-records for a domain, this can be done with the following command;

nslookup-q=txt yourdomain.com