PINGURL

Friendly command line utility to ping a url, log its http status and notify you when it's not 200.

Pitch

Because sometimes you need to ping a url for a rational reason or not.

This script was designed to ping a url for a given interval that you set. It is best used if you need to continuously ping a url in the background and not worry about it until the status code changes. For this reason, the settings are done in a conf file at once. If you need to punctually ping a url, you can do this in a one liner, see Notes.

Also you have got to read the story of this script, you will love it forever (the script, I mean): http://machinesaredigging.com/2013/04/28/therapy-by-software/

Features

• Configure a conf file with your preferred settings
• Set the url to ping in a conf file
• [option] Set the interval at which the script should execute
• [option] Log the resulting http status in the file ping_logs.txt | format = [status][url][date]
• [option] Notify you at your email address when the status code is not 200

Requirements

• The mail utility if you want to be notified by email. To get it : sudo apt-get install mailutils
• The machine on which you run the script should have a smtp server enabled on it
• This script has been tested for Ubuntu 11.1

Installation

1. download the repository

Usage

1. Set the url you want to ping in the conf file. Then edit the conf with your other settings. See Configuration.

2. Run the script from the repository folder

    ./ping_url
   

Example of console output

 ping_url done; status code = 200; url = https://github.com/; logs = ok; repeat in 1d...

Example of logs in ping_logs.txt

  200 https://github.com/ Wed Apr 24 17:37:59 CEST 2013

Configuration

Configuration setting is done in the conf file.

---

 [required] url :: http://www.github.com

The url is required. The script will function with only that line in the conf file.

[optional] interval :: 1d

The interval at which the script should execute. The format is the same as the arguments for sleep. See man sleep.

[optional] logs :: true

If you wish to keep logs. The logs will be saved in the same directory in ping_logs.txt. Possible values = true, false.

[optional] email :: notify@example.com

Set the email address at which you want to be notified when the status code is not 200.

---

If you don't want an option, delete the corresponding line or set its value to nothing. ex : [optional] interval ::

Notes

To ping a url only once this line from the script is enough :

    curl -sIL --url http://www.github.com -w "%{http_code} %{url_effective}" -o /dev/null

Yet, since it's rather ugly, you can also use the script and remove all the options from the conf file.