Ping a website in R

Question

I would like to create a script in R that pings a given website. I haven't found any information about this specific for R.

To start with, all I need is the information on whether the website responses to the ping or not.

Does anyone have information about existing scripts or which package best to use to start with?

A comment on terminology: pinging is directed to a host, not a website. If it matters, you may want to understand the difference between a server, host, IP, domain, and website. It isn't a big deal for most purposes, though. — Iterator, Aug 10 '11 at 16:04
Note that some people construe "ping a website" to mean "send a GET query and make sure a response code 200 is returned". I agree it's not the common terminology but it is out there. — patrickmdnet, Aug 11 '11 at 06:56

score 22 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 09 '16 at 07:49

We can use a system2 call to get the return status of the ping command in the shell. On Windows (and probably linux) following will work :

ping <- function(x, stderr = FALSE, stdout = FALSE, ...){
    pingvec <- system2("ping", x,
                       stderr = FALSE,
                       stdout = FALSE,...)
    if (pingvec == 0) TRUE else FALSE
}

# example
> ping("google.com")
[1] FALSE
> ping("ugent.be")
[1] TRUE

If you want to capture the output of ping, you can either set stdout = "", or use a system call:

> X <- system("ping ugent.be", intern = TRUE)
> X
 [1] ""                                                         "Pinging ugent.be [157.193.43.50] with 32 bytes of data:" 
 [3] "Reply from 157.193.43.50: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=62"       "Reply from 157.193.43.50: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=62"      
 [5] "Reply from 157.193.43.50: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=62"       "Reply from 157.193.43.50: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=62"      
 [7] ""                                                         "Ping statistics for 157.193.43.50:"                      
 [9] "    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss)," "Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:"          
[11] "    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms"

using the option intern = TRUE makes it possible to save the output in a vector. I leave it to the reader as an exercise to rearrange this in order to get some decent output.

Thanks (upvoted) but it's looping. In your code we have to use `ping -c1` (or a finite number). `system2("ping", paste0("-c1 ",x),`. link: [Ping for 4 times](https://askubuntu.com/a/200992/972235) — phili_b, Oct 02 '19 at 08:39
It works on **Mac** too. Its just that when the ping is good (the host is available), the function doesn't immediately return the `TRUE` boolean value. However, when the ping is bad (the host is unavailable), the function immediately returns the `FALSE` boolean value. — Abel Callejo, Oct 20 '21 at 23:40
[The suggestion by **phili_b**](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7012796/ping-a-website-in-r#comment102774203_7013503) solves the issue I mentioned about the [function not returning immediately the value `TRUE`](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7012796/ping-a-website-in-r#comment123118904_7013503). — Abel Callejo, Oct 20 '21 at 23:46

score 11 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '18 at 07:58

11

RCurl::url.exists works for localhost (where ping doesn't always) and is faster than RCurl::getURL.

> library(RCurl)
> url.exists("google.com")
[1] TRUE
> url.exists("localhost:8888")
[1] TRUE
> url.exists("localhost:8012")
[1] FALSE

Note that it is possible to set the timeout (which by default is rather long)

> url.exists("google.com", timeout = 5) # timeout in seconds
[1] TRUE

edited May 23 '18 at 07:58

Aditya

1,554
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23

answered Aug 02 '13 at 19:25

justinjhendrick

426
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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 24 '18 at 10:33

2

To get the status code

library(httr)

b <- GET("http://www.google.com")

b$status_code

[1] 200

answered Oct 24 '18 at 10:33

BRCN

635
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score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 20 '21 at 20:06

There is a package for this ... {pingr} Link to CRAN.

library(pingr)

# check if domain can be reached via port 80
is_up(destination = "example.com")

## [1] TRUE


# check how domain name is resolved to ip adress
nsl("example.com")

## $answer
##          name class type   ttl          data
## 1 example.com     1    1 85619 93.184.216.34
## 
## $flags
## aa tc rd ra ad cd 
## NA NA NA NA NA NA 


# check HTTP port
pingr::ping_port("example.com", 80)


# check HTTPS port
pingr::ping_port("example.com", 443)

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 11 '11 at 07:15

If you want to see if a website is responding to HTTP requests, you can test an URL in R with the RCurl library, which is an R interface to the curl HTTP client library.

Example:

> library(RCurl);
> getURL("http://www.google.com")
[1] "<!doctype html><ht....

If you want to examine the response code (for 200, 404, etc.) you will need to write a custom function to pass as the "header" option to getURL().

Ping a website in R

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