curl and ping - how to check whether a website is either up or down?

Question

I want to check whether a website is up or down at a particular instance using PHP. I came to know that curl will fetch the contents of the file but I don't want to read the content of the website. I just want to check the status of the website. Is there any way to check the status of the site? Can we use ping to check the status? It is sufficient for me to get the status signals like (404, 403, etc) from the server. A small snippet of code might help me a lot.

Answer 1

something like this should work

    $url = 'yoururl';
    $ch = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    curl_exec($ch);
    $retcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
    curl_close($ch);
    if (200==$retcode) {
        // All's well
    } else {
        // not so much
    }