Checking a website status

A website may be down as its connectivity to the rest of the internet is broken in some way. We start this chapter by checking the status of a website. Though this is a very simple exercise done with just Python, this can be extended as a health monitor application for more complex scenarios on the internet.

 

Getting ready

This function tests the connectivity of a website by a given address or a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) and port (default 80 assumed). When a domain name is passed as an address, the socket.connect() method resolves it.

How to do it...

Here we will look into a simple recipe that performs this action, as indicated by listing 14.1:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# Python Network Programming Cookbook, Second Edition
  -- Chapter - 14 
# This program is optimized for Python 2.7.12 and
  Python 3.5.2. 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
  
import socket 
from sys import stdout 
from time import sleep 
import argparse 
  
def is_alive...