Ping a site in Python?

Question

How do I ping a website or IP address with Python?

Answer 1

Here's a short snippet using subprocess. The check_call method either returns 0 for success, or raises an exception. This way, I don't have to parse the output of ping. I'm using shlex to split the command line arguments.

  import subprocess
  import shlex

  command_line = "ping -c 1 www.google.comsldjkflksj"
  args = shlex.split(command_line)
  try:
      subprocess.check_call(args,stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
      print "Website is there."
  except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
      print "Couldn't get a ping."

Answer 2

using subprocess ping command to ping decode it because the response is binary:

import subprocess
ping_response = subprocess.Popen(["ping", "-a", "google.com"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).stdout.read()
result = ping_response.decode('utf-8')
print(result)

Answer 3

You may find Noah Gift's presentation Creating Agile Commandline Tools With Python. In it he combines subprocess, Queue and threading to develop solution that is capable of pinging hosts concurrently and speeding up the process. Below is a basic version before he adds command line parsing and some other features. The code to this version and others can be found here

#!/usr/bin/env python2.5
from threading import Thread
import subprocess
from Queue import Queue

num_threads = 4
queue = Queue()
ips = ["10.0.1.1", "10.0.1.3", "10.0.1.11", "10.0.1.51"]
#wraps system ping command
def pinger(i, q):
    """Pings subnet"""
    while True:
        ip = q.get()
        print "Thread %s: Pinging %s" % (i, ip)
        ret = subprocess.call("ping -c 1 %s" % ip,
            shell=True,
            stdout=open('/dev/null', 'w'),
            stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
        if ret == 0:
            print "%s: is alive" % ip
        else:
            print "%s: did not respond" % ip
        q.task_done()
#Spawn thread pool
for i in range(num_threads):

    worker = Thread(target=pinger, args=(i, queue))
    worker.setDaemon(True)
    worker.start()
#Place work in queue
for ip in ips:
    queue.put(ip)
#Wait until worker threads are done to exit    
queue.join()

He is also author of: Python for Unix and Linux System Administration

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