curl and ping - how to check whether a website is either up or down?

Question

I want to check whether a website is up or down at a particular instance using PHP. I came to know that curl will fetch the contents of the file but I don\'t want to read th

Answer 1

Have you seen the get_headers() function ? http://it.php.net/manual/en/function.get-headers.php . It seems to do exactly what you need.

If you use curl directly with the -I flag, it will return the HTTP headers (404 etc) instead of the page HTML. In PHP, the equivalent is the curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 1); option.