ruby ping for 1.9.1

Question

I want to ping a site in my ruby code and saw that net-ping was a nice library to do this with. Unfortunately, when I tried to gem install net-ping I got the following error:

Answer 1

You can always do this and use regexps to parse the result or just check the exit status:

ping_count = 10
server = "www.google.com"
result = `ping -q -c #{ping_count} #{server}`
if ($?.exitstatus == 0) do
  puts "Device is up!"
end

Ping return values that you can check against:

The ping utility returns an exit status of zero if at least one response was heard from the specified host; a status of two if the transmission was successful but no responses were received; or another value (from <sysexits.h>) if an error occurred.

http://www.manpagez.com/man/8/ping

Answer 2

For windows follow these instructions:

download djberg96-net-ping-net-ping-1.5.3-0-g9252076.zip from github.com/djberg96/net-ping
unzip, cd in the folder
gem build net-ping.gemspec
gem install net-ping-1.5.3-universal-mingw32.gem
gem install win32-security

to use it:

require 'net/ping'
p Net::Ping::TCP.new('www.google.com', 'http').ping?
p Net::Ping::TCP.new('foo.bar.baz').ping?

Answer 3

If by 'site' you mean website, then I wouldn't use ping. Ping will tell you if the host is up (unless a router or firewall is blocking ICMP), but it won't tell you if your web server or web app is responding properly.

If that's the case, I'd recommend Net::HTTP from the standard library, or any of the other HTTP libraries. One way to do it is:

def up?(site)
  Net::HTTP.new(site).head('/').kind_of? Net::HTTPOK
end

up? 'www.google.com' #=> true

Answer 4

Use from source

gem "net-ping", :git => 'git://github.com/djberg96/net-ping.git'
# bundle install

Now you can use functions from it in 1.9.2