Ping a site in Python?

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

See this pure Python ping by Matthew Dixon Cowles and Jens Diemer. Also, remember that Python requires root to spawn ICMP (i.e. ping) sockets in linux.

import ping, socket
try:
    ping.verbose_ping('www.google.com', count=3)
    delay = ping.Ping('www.wikipedia.org', timeout=2000).do()
except socket.error, e:
    print "Ping Error:", e

The source code itself is easy to read, see the implementations of verbose_ping and of Ping.do for inspiration.

Depending on what you want to achive, you are probably easiest calling the system ping command..

Using the subprocess module is the best way of doing this, although you have to remember the ping command is different on different operating systems!

import subprocess

host = "www.google.com"

ping = subprocess.Popen(
    ["ping", "-c", "4", host],
    stdout = subprocess.PIPE,
    stderr = subprocess.PIPE
)

out, error = ping.communicate()
print out

You don't need to worry about shell-escape characters. For example..

host = "google.com; `echo test`

..will not execute the echo command.

Now, to actually get the ping results, you could parse the out variable. Example output:

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 248.139/249.474/250.530/0.896 ms

Example regex:

import re
matcher = re.compile("round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = (\d+.\d+)/(\d+.\d+)/(\d+.\d+)/(\d+.\d+)")
print matcher.search(out).groups()

# ('248.139', '249.474', '250.530', '0.896')

Again, remember the output will vary depending on operating system (and even the version of ping). This isn't ideal, but it will work fine in many situations (where you know the machines the script will be running on)

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

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515qmR%2B4sjL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

It's hard to say what your question is, but there are some alternatives.

If you mean to literally execute a request using the ICMP ping protocol, you can get an ICMP library and execute the ping request directly. Google "Python ICMP" to find things like this icmplib. You might want to look at scapy, also.

This will be much faster than using os.system("ping " + ip ).

If you mean to generically "ping" a box to see if it's up, you can use the echo protocol on port 7.

For echo, you use the socket library to open the IP address and port 7. You write something on that port, send a carriage return ("\r\n") and then read the reply.

If you mean to "ping" a web site to see if the site is running, you have to use the http protocol on port 80.

For or properly checking a web server, you use urllib2 to open a specific URL. (/index.html is always popular) and read the response.

There are still more potential meaning of "ping" including "traceroute" and "finger".

Ping a site in Python?

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