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 ?

Answer 1

Hi this class can do speed and up test for your web page with this class:

 from urllib.request import urlopen
 from socket import socket
 import time


 def tcp_test(server_info):
     cpos = server_info.find(':')
     try:
         sock = socket()
         sock.connect((server_info[:cpos], int(server_info[cpos+1:])))
         sock.close
         return True
     except Exception as e:
         return False


 def http_test(server_info):
     try:
         # TODO : we can use this data after to find sub urls up or down    results
         startTime = time.time()
         data = urlopen(server_info).read()
         endTime = time.time()
         speed = endTime - startTime
         return {'status' : 'up', 'speed' : str(speed)}
     except Exception as e:
         return {'status' : 'down', 'speed' : str(-1)}


 def server_test(test_type, server_info):
     if test_type.lower() == 'tcp':
         return tcp_test(server_info)
     elif test_type.lower() == 'http':
         return http_test(server_info)

Answer 2

my 2 cents

def getResponseCode(url):
conn = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
return conn.getcode()

if getResponseCode(url) != 200:
    print('Wrong URL')
else:
    print('Good URL')

Answer 3

from urllib.request import Request, urlopen
from urllib.error import URLError, HTTPError
req = Request("http://stackoverflow.com")
try:
    response = urlopen(req)
except HTTPError as e:
    print('The server couldn\'t fulfill the request.')
    print('Error code: ', e.code)
except URLError as e:
    print('We failed to reach a server.')
    print('Reason: ', e.reason)
else:
    print ('Website is working fine')

Works on Python 3

Answer 4

In my opinion, caisah's answer misses an important part of your question, namely dealing with the server being offline.

Still, using requests is my favorite option, albeit as such:

import requests

try:
    requests.get(url)
except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError:
    print(f"URL {url} not reachable")

Answer 5

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 6

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/.