How to ping with Python using PythonPing

In this article we look at adding ping type functionality to your python scripts, we do this

PythonPing is simple way to ping in Python. With it, you can send ICMP Probes to remote devices like you would do from the terminal.

PythonPing is modular, so that you can run it in a script as a standalone function, or integrate its components in a fully-fledged application.

Installation

pip install pythonping

Examples

Basic example

Ping the localhost IP address, if you want the output to be displayed you need the verbose=True

from pythonping import ping

ping('127.0.0.1', verbose=True)

Output

C:\Python38-32\Examples>python ping1.py
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 9 bytes in 0.02ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 9 bytes in 0.01ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 9 bytes in 0.01ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 9 bytes in 0.0ms

You can also tune your ping by using some of its additional parameters:

• size is an integer that allows you to specify the size of the ICMP payload
• timeout is the number of seconds you wish to wait for a response, before assuming the target is unreachable
• payload allows you to use a specific payload in bytes
• count allows you to define how many ICMP packets to send
• interval the time to wait between pings which is in seconds
• sweep_start and sweep_end allows you to perform a ping sweep, starting from payload size defined in sweep_start and growing up to size defined in sweep_end. Here, we repeat the payload you provided to match the desired size, or we generate a random one if no payload was provided. Note that if you defined size, these two fields will be ignored
• df is a flag that, if set to True, will enable the Don’t Fragment flag in the IP header
• verbose enables the verbose mode, printing output to a stream
• out is the target stream of verbose mode. If you enable the verbose mode and do not provide out, verbose output will be send to the sys.stdout stream. You may want to use a file here.
• match is a flag that, if set to True, will enable payload matching between a ping request and reply (default behaviour follows that of Windows which counts a successful reply by a matched packet identifier only; Linux behaviour counts a non equivalent payload with a matched packet identifier in reply as fail, such as when pinging 8.8.8.8 with 1000 bytes and the reply is truncated to only the first 74 of request payload with a matching packet identifier)

Lets see an example of these parameters in action

Example

In this example we define the size of the payload as 40 and the amount of packets to send as 10

from pythonping import ping

response_list = ping('127.0.0.1', size=40, count=10, verbose=True)

Output

C:\Python38-32\Examples>python ping1.py
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.01ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.01ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.01ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.0ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.0ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.01ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.0ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.01ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.0ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 48 bytes in 0.0ms