Fix Python – How can I see if there’s an available and active network connection in Python?

Question 1

I want to see if I can access an online API, but for that, I need to have Internet access.

How can I see if there’s a connection available and active using Python?

Question 2

Perhaps you could use something like this:

import urllib2

def internet_on():
    try:
        urllib2.urlopen('http://216.58.192.142', timeout=1)
        return True
    except urllib2.URLError as err: 
        return False

Currently, 216.58.192.142 is one of the IP addresses for google.com. Change http://216.58.192.142 to whatever site can be expected to respond quickly.

This fixed IP will not map to google.com forever. So this code is
not robust — it will need constant maintenance to keep it working.

The reason why the code above uses a fixed IP address instead of fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is because a FQDN would require a DNS lookup. When the machine does not have a working internet connection, the DNS lookup itself may block the call to urllib_request.urlopen for more than a second. Thanks to @rzetterberg for pointing this out.

If the fixed IP address above is not working, you can find a current IP address for google.com (on unix) by running

% dig google.com  +trace 
...
google.com.     300 IN  A   216.58.192.142

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