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

Here is how I did it. I set the user agent to minimize the chance of the target banning me and also disabled SSL verification since I know the target:

private static function checkSite( $url ) {
    $useragent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

    $options = array(
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,      // return web page
            CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,     // do not return headers
            CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,      // follow redirects
            CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => $useragent, // who am i
            CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,       // set referer on redirect
            CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 2,          // timeout on connect (in seconds)
            CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 2,          // timeout on response (in seconds)
            CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,         // stop after 10 redirects
            CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,     // SSL verification not required
            CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => false,     // SSL verification not required
    );
    $ch = curl_init( $url );
    curl_setopt_array( $ch, $options );
    curl_exec( $ch );

    $httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    curl_close($ch);
    return ($httpcode == 200);
}