Checking if a website is up via Python

Question

By using python, how can I check if a website is up? From what I read, I need to check the "HTTP HEAD" and see status code "200 OK", but how to do so ?

Cheers

Related

• How do you send a HEAD HTTP request in Python?

Answer 1

I think the easiest way to do it is by using Requests module.

import requests

def url_ok(url):
    r = requests.head(url)
    return r.status_code == 200

Answer 2

If by up, you simply mean "the server is serving", then you could use cURL, and if you get a response than it's up.

I can't give you specific advice because I'm not a python programmer, however here is a link to pycurl http://pycurl.sourceforge.net/.

Answer 3

import httplib
import socket
import re

def is_website_online(host):
    """ This function checks to see if a host name has a DNS entry by checking
        for socket info. If the website gets something in return, 
        we know it's available to DNS.
    """
    try:
        socket.gethostbyname(host)
    except socket.gaierror:
        return False
    else:
        return True


def is_page_available(host, path="/"):
    """ This function retreives the status code of a website by requesting
        HEAD data from the host. This means that it only requests the headers.
        If the host cannot be reached or something else goes wrong, it returns
        False.
    """
    try:
        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(host)
        conn.request("HEAD", path)
        if re.match("^[23]\d\d$", str(conn.getresponse().status)):
            return True
    except StandardError:
        return None

Answer 4

If server if down, on python 2.7 x86 windows urllib have no timeout and program go to dead lock. So use urllib2

import urllib2
import socket

def check_url( url, timeout=5 ):
    try:
        return urllib2.urlopen(url,timeout=timeout).getcode() == 200
    except urllib2.URLError as e:
        return False
    except socket.timeout as e:
        print False


print check_url("http://google.fr")  #True 
print check_url("http://notexist.kc") #False     

Answer 5

The HTTPConnection object from the httplib module in the standard library will probably do the trick for you. BTW, if you start doing anything advanced with HTTP in Python, be sure to check out httplib2; it's a great library.

Answer 6

You could try to do this with getcode() from urllib

>>> print urllib.urlopen("http://www.stackoverflow.com").getcode()
>>> 200

EDIT: For more modern python, i.e. python3, use:

import urllib.request
print(urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.stackoverflow.com").getcode())
>>> 200