Use FURL to Retrieve Website Headers

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It's important to know what headers your website and its files are communicating. For example, if your website is providing a 404 status, you're probably streaking toward your computer to fix the problem. Using the FURL library, you may retrieve website headers from the command line.

The Shell Script

furl https://davidwalsh.name

Simple and quick -- just like every shell directive.

The Sample Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:50:50 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
X-Pingback: https://davidwalsh.name/xmlrpc.php
Cache-Control: max-age=1, private, must-revalidate
Expires: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:50:51 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Don't have FURL? Install it by scripting this:

sudo port install furl

How is this useful? I would use this to periodically (cron) check my website to make sure it was up. What would you use this for?

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Discussion

  1. I’d use it to retrieve the X-Pingback value and if it was included, I’d send a trackback. ;-)

  2. adamnfish

    Or, if you don’t fancy installing furl for this, you can do the same with curl (a powerful and flexible utility for doing performing requests) with the -I flag:

    eg.
    curl -I http://davidwalsh.name

    (you probably have curl installed already)

    to see the headers and the full response, use the verbose flag
    curl -v http://davidwalsh.name

  3. @adamnfish: Thanks for sharing that. On a side note, “adamnfish” sounds like a wacky morning FM radio show.

  4. Not sure where sources are but the Debian package is at http://bertorello.ns0.it/debian/furl/

  5. As already mentioned,

    curl -I HOSTNAME

    Has the same functionality but without installing something extra.

  6. curl -I is good. This is another suggestion…

    lwp-request -ed “http://lindesk.com/”

  7. Marco

    another trick is:

    lynx -head http://davidwalsh.name

    lynx is a linux textual browser

  8. Dang! I should have read this sooner. I was itching to jump all over the “curl -I” suggestion. Everyone got here first!

  9. Rex

    alias furl=’curl -i -X HEAD’

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