Ping

A PHP class to ping hosts.

There are a ton of different methods of pinging a server using PHP, and I've found most to be poorly documented or downright dangerous in their implementation.

Therefore, I've created this simple class, which incorporates the three most popular ping methods (exec() with the system's ping utility, fsockopen(), and socket_create()). Each method has its benefits and drawbacks, and may work better or worse on a particular system.

Usage

This is a very simple class. Just create an instance, and run ping().

$host = 'www.example.com';
$ping = new Ping($host);
$latency = $ping->ping();
if ($latency !== false) {
  print 'Latency is ' . $latency . ' ms';
}
else {
  print 'Host could not be reached.';
}

You can also specify the ttl (maximum hops) and timeout when creating the instance:

$ttl = 128;
$timeout = 5;
$ping = new Ping($host, $ttl, $timeout);

...or using the setTtl() or setTimeout() methods:

$ping = new Ping($host);
$ping->setTtl(128);
$ping->setTimeout(5);

You can change the host using the setHost() method:

$ping = new Ping($host);
...
$ping->setHost('www.anotherexample.com');

License

Ping is licensed under the MIT (Expat) license. See included LICENSE.md.

Author

Ping is maintained by Jeff Geerling, and is used to check servers for Server Check.in, an inexpensive website and server uptime monitoring service.