PHP Website Exists?

Sometimes its handy to know if a website is up or not from code. E.G In a list of websites you are managing. I put this function together to tell me if the site is online or not.

 php | 
 copy code |
?
 
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function site_exists($url) {
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 if (!empty($url) && ($con = curl_init($url)) !== false) { //start the connection
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 //Setup connection operators
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 curl_setopt($con, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
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 curl_setopt($con, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
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 if (($data = curl_exec($con)) !== false && ($code = curl_getinfo($con, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE)) !== false) {
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 return true;
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 }
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 curl_close();
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 }
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 return false;
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 }

by changing line 8 to the below code you can get the http status code for a more detailed report.

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return $code;

If you are checking a lot of website you may want to change line 4, the current setting tells cURL to wait 10 seconds before failing. However, normally 2-3 seconds is acceptable. If you are checking hundreds of website you may want to turn off (Not available in PHP safe mode) php maximum execution time with set_time_limit ( int $seconds ) or infact turn this on.