Command-line way of send pinging

Question

I have lots of Drupal powered website. Each of the website has Multiping module to pinging ping server.

Is there any way of send pinging through command-line?

I hope I can build dedicated server for pinging.

Answer 1

As Caleb notes, cURL is usually the weapon of choice for command-line HTTP. The tricky part - as Caleb again notes - is putting the request together, especially for XML-RPC, where the server is likely looking for a well-formed input.

But if you poke around at the source for Multipin, you see that it's not just a simple HTTP request (thought it does fall back to that) - and it changes based on what services the target service has enabled -- and, in the case of weblogUpdates -- special-cases what is sent:

// Ping! Check service method
if (!empty($pingservice->method)) {
  if ($pingservice->method == 'weblogUpdates.ping') {
    $result = xmlrpc($pingservice->url, $pingservice->method, $name, $base_url);
  }
  else {
    $result = xmlrpc($pingservice->url, $pingservice->method, $name, $base_url, $rss_url);
  }
}
else {
  $pingurl = strtr($pingservice->url, array(
    '%name' => urlencode($name),
    '%url' => urlencode($base_url .'/'),
    '%rss' => urlencode($rss_url),
  ));
  $result = drupal_http_request($pingurl);

And a few lines above, it's clever about deciding what rss URL to send, based on taxonomy, etc.

So I'd suggestion one of two approaches.

1. If you just want to get something going, simulate the drupal_http_request by sending something like this:

   $ curl <target-pingservice-url> -d 'name=<your site name>' -d url=<your-url> -d rss=/rss.xml
   

2. Alternatively: if want all the behavior of MultiPing, you could extract that _multiping_doping function and run it from the command line directly by PHP.

   The workhorse function you'll need is Drupal's xmlrpc: http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21common.inc/function/xmlrpc/7

Good luck!