Getting HTTP code in PHP using curl

Question

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?

Answer 1

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;