error when using pywhois

Question

I tryed to use pywhois to check domain availability:

import pywhois
try:
        w = pywhois.whois('domain_name')
        message='Domain is available' 
except:
        message='Domain is not available'

but I get this error:

'module' object has no attribute 'whois'

I installed pywhois with this command:

easy_install pywhois

It was installed successfully,what I missed?
Edit: the best and more stable way to check domain availability is this way:

try:
        import socket
    socket.gethostbyname_ex('domain_name') 
            message='Domain is not available'
except:
        message='Domain is available'

Answer 1

easy_install pywhois 

installs a different tool - it is a CLI tool - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pywhois. To install the desired pywhois python lib, check it out from googlecode(hg clone https://code.google.com/p/pywhois/) or github (git clone https://github.com/unpluggd/pywhois.git)

and from the source dir run

python setup.py install

Answer 2

The project pywhois is moved to Bitbucket, here.

To install pywhois,

pip install python-whois

To use pywhois (import whois), here is an example.

import whois            
#check if a domain name is registered or not
try :
    w = whois.whois(url)
except (whois.parser.PywhoisError):  #NOT FOUND
    print(url)   #unregistered domain names, it is not very accurate.

A kind reminder that using pywhois is not very accurate. For more info, you can refer this question.