Pinging a website

[pxnguinPr3]

Hi, I was trying to figure out a way to ping my website to check its running, and if its not output a gpio signal from a raspberry pi to light up a LED (I can do the gpio signal part)
 

But couldnt for the life of my figure out any way to use python to ping a website.

 

Thanks for any help,

 

Pxnguin

[jj9987]

7 minutes ago, pxnguinPr3 said:

Hi, I was trying to figure out a way to ping my website to check its running, and if its not output a gpio signal from a raspberry pi to light up a LED (I can do the gpio signal part)
 

But couldnt for the life of my figure out any way to use python to ping a website.

 

Thanks for any help,

 

Pxnguin

You don't ping a website. You ping a server. ICMP packets are sent to a network device, not to an application (web server).

You can send an HTTP request to the website and check if that gives what it has to (check the status code, check the body).

 

For that I recommend Python requests module.

[mariushm]

A super basic and simple way would be to use https://docs.python.org/2/library/robotparser.html

Put a robots.txt on your website and use those functions to check if it can be retrieved.

 

Pinging a ip doesn't mean a website is live, this ensures the http server is also on and can serve files to you and since robots.txt is only a few bytes, it can be easy on everything.

 

Another option is to use the socket functions : https://docs.python.org/2/library/socket.html#example

See first example, the client part (the bit with # Echo client program at the start) ... change it so you just connect and read some data instead of sending anything. If your web site has a ftp server, connect to ip and port 21  and as soon as you're connected the server should send a text with something like type your username and password etc so you'll know it's a ftp server)

[pxnguinPr3]

21 minutes ago, James Evens said:

Do you need a Pi? The ESP8266 is much cheaper. One way would be to use the ping library for the esp8266.

If you want to use a pi it comes with a full linux which has the ping command is build in. Just write a short script.

Ah, alright. I already have a pi, i just need a way to get the ping command to communicate with python as im using a python library called Blinkt! as status LEDS.

[vorticalbox]

8 hours ago, pxnguinPr3 said:

Ah, alright. I already have a pi, i just need a way to get the ping command to communicate with python as im using a python library called Blinkt! as status LEDS.

As said just throw a file in the root and use requests library to hit the file and see if it's there.

 

Also just because the site is live doesn't mean it's functioning