How to get the domain name from a URL in JavaScript

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to get the domain name from a URL using JavaScript. Many tutorials around the web use complicated regular expression to achieve this task but it can be done in a more straight forward way using the URL API.

Note – if you are looking to get the domain name from the current page being viewed in a browser you can simply use window.location.hostname. This tutorial is for those that need to extract the domain name from a URL that’s part of a data source.

First let’s create a string with our URL:

const url = "https://www.example.com/blog?search=hello&world";
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

If this isn’t a correctly formatted full URL e.g example.com/blog an error is thrown.

Next create a URL object using the new URL() constructor:

let domain = (new URL(url));
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The URL() constructor allows us to create a URL object from a string similar to the object created when using window.location. With the object created we can access the hostname property which returns a string containing the domain name:

domain = domain.hostname;
console.log(domain); //www.example.com
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

If you require a naked domain the www can be removed using the replace() method.

domain = domain.hostname.replace('www.','');
console.log(domain); //example.com
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Some additional properties you can access using the URL constructor include:

const pathname = domain.pathname; 
console.log(pathname); // blog

const protocol = domain.protocol; 
console.log(protocol); // https

const search = domain.search; 
console.log(search); // ?search=hello&world
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The URL API is currently supported by all modern browsers with a polyfill available for IE. Hopefully you found this tutorial helpful, if so you might enjoy some of these other practical Javascript tutorials.