Getting HTTP code in PHP using curl

I'm using CURL to get the status of a site, if it's up/down or redirecting to another site. I want to get it as streamlined as possible, but it's not working well.

<?php
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,10);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);

return $httpcode;
?>

I have this wrapped in a function. It works fine but performance is not the best because it downloads the whole page, thing in if I remove $output = curl_exec($ch); it returns 0 all the time.

Does anyone know how to make the performance better?

First make sure if the URL is actually valid (a string, not empty, good syntax), this is quick to check server side. For example, doing this first could save a lot of time:

if(!$url || !is_string($url) || ! preg_match('/^http(s)?:\/\/[a-z0-9-]+(.[a-z0-9-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?(\/.*)?$/i', $url)){
    return false;
}

Make sure you only fetch the headers, not the body content:

@curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER  , true);  // we want headers
@curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY  , true);  // we don't need body

For more details on getting the URL status http code I refer to another post I made (it also helps with following redirects):

• How can I check if a URL exists via PHP?

As a whole:

$url = 'http://www.example.com';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);    // we want headers
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);    // we don't need body
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,10);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);

echo 'HTTP code: ' . $httpcode;

// must set $url first....
$http = curl_init($url);
// do your curl thing here
$result = curl_exec($http);
$http_status = curl_getinfo($http, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($http);
echo $http_status;

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST,false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
$rt = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
echo $info["http_code"];

Try PHP's "get_headers" function.

Something along the lines of:

<?php
    $url = 'http://www.example.com';
    print_r(get_headers($url));
    print_r(get_headers($url, 1));
?>

curl_getinfo — Get information regarding a specific transfer

Check curl_getinfo

<?php
// Create a curl handle
$ch = curl_init('http://www.yahoo.com/');

// Execute
curl_exec($ch);

// Check if any error occurred
if(!curl_errno($ch))
{
 $info = curl_getinfo($ch);

 echo 'Took ' . $info['total_time'] . ' seconds to send a request to ' . $info['url'];
}

// Close handle
curl_close($ch);