Question

How would I go about checking if a URL exists using Ruby?

For example, for the URL

https://google.com

the result should be truthy, but for the URLs

https://no.such.domain

or

https://stackoverflow.com/no/such/path

the result should be falsey

Answer 1

Use the Net::HTTP library.

require "net/http"
url = URI.parse("http://www.google.com/")
req = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
res = req.request_head(url.path)

At this point res is a Net::HTTPResponse object containing the result of the request. You can then check the response code:

do_something_with_it(url) if res.code == "200"

Note: To check for https based url, use_ssl attribute should be true as:

require "net/http"
url = URI.parse("https://www.google.com/")
req = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
req.use_ssl = true
res = req.request_head(url.path)