I want to check what HTTP status code is returned for an HTTP(S) URL. I don't care about content, so I just request head with curl -I $url or curl --head $url
But what's the exit code I should check for, e.g. in subprocess.check_call? In particular, do I get a non-zero exit code for HTTP 403?
curl -I will always return 0, if it managed to produce an output with the HEAD. You have two alternatives.
The first is to use curl -I --fail instead, and check for exit code 22.
If you're doing this in a Python script, it could look like:
try:
subprocess.check_call(['curl', '-I', '--fail', url])
except subprocess.CalledProcessError as e:
if e.returncode == 22:
(do something)
The second is to actually ask just the HTTP status code, like this:
$ curl -s -I -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' $bad-url
403
If you truly just want the HTTP status codes from a python script, you may want to check out the 'requests' library:
http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/
#Prints status code:
import requests
r = requests.get('http://superuser.com')
print(r.status_code)
