Test if webpage is responding via php

Question

I'm trying to build a basic "status" page using php that will tell my users if various services (webpages we use) are at least serving up pages (which isn't 100% guarantee of working but its pretty good indicator)

what i would like to do is something like

www.domainname.com/mediawiki/index.php and make sure that returns the page or not

I'm pretty new to php so im not even sure what function im looking for.

Thanks

Do not forget whatever the solutions you take, you can "play" with timeouts. For example file_get_contents you can set the function timeout directly in the third parameter. See: http://php.net/manual/fr/function.file-get-contents.php — Cybrix, Oct 20 '10 at 18:25

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

5

There are ways to use built-in PHP functions to do this (e.g. file_get_contents), but they aren't very good. I suggest you take a look at the excellent cURL library. This might point you in the right direction: Header only retrieval in php via curl

Since you just want to see if a page is "up" you don't need to request the whole page, you can just use a HEAD request to get the headers for the page.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

Community

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answered Oct 20 '10 at 18:02

Eli

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file_get_contents is disabled on many shared hosting systems and it returns more data than you need to determine if the page is available. – Alan Geleynse Oct 20 '10 at 18:12
True but you'd be surprised how many scripts are (misguidedly) written to die on HEAD. Plus, you can set file_get_contents to perform a HEAD request. Either way, I'd suggest searching the returned source for a certain string for better determination. – webbiedave Oct 20 '10 at 18:14
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@Alan and `cURL` is always enabled? I dont think so. – Cybrix Oct 20 '10 at 18:14
@Cybrix cURL is not always enabled either, but most places I have seen file_get_contents disabled, cURL is. If you have it available, cURL is usually a better choice due to its flexibility, but you have to just use what you have available on your system. – Alan Geleynse Oct 20 '10 at 18:17
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@webbiedave That's a good point, you would have to see what you the script you are using returns. And if it is not a very large page, it won't make much of a difference anyways. – Alan Geleynse Oct 20 '10 at 18:18

webbiedave · Answer 2 · 2010-10-20T18:09:55.130

Check out file_get_contents

It will return the web page source as a string. This way you could even search the string for a specific value, if so desired, for finer results. This can be very useful in case content is still returned but is some sort of error message.

$somePage = file_get_contents('http://www.domainname.com/mediawiki/index.php');
// $somePage now contains the HTML source or false if failed

Ensure allow_url_fopen = On in your php.ini

If you need to check the response headers, you can use $http_response_header

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 20 '10 at 18:05

0

Try this:

<?php
    $_URL = "http://www.domainname.com/mediawiki/index.php";

    if (! @file_get_contents($_URL))
    {
        echo "Service not responding.";
    }
?>

Note that your php.ini must activate allow_url_fopen

Good luck

answered Oct 20 '10 at 18:05

Cybrix

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 20 '10 at 19:19

Another option would be to see of the socket is responding. (I can't remember where I got this from originally but it lets me know if port 80 is responding). You could always direct this to a different port.

function server($addr){
    if(strstr($addr,'/')){$addr = substr($addr, 0, strpos($addr, '/'));}
    return $addr;
};    

$link    = 'secure.sdinsite.net:';
$s_link  = str_replace('::', ':', $link);
$address = explode (':',"$s_link");
$churl   = @fsockopen(server($addrress[0]), 80, $errno, $errstr, 20);

if (!$churl) {
    $status = 'dead';
} else {
    $status = 'live';
};

echo $status;

Test if webpage is responding via php

4 Answers4