Skip to content

pythonping

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.

Warning: Since using pythonping requires root permissions or granting cap_net_raw capability to the python interpreter, try to measure the latency to a server by other means such as using requests.

Installation⚑

pip install pythonping

By default it requires root permissions to run because Operating systems are designed to require root for creating raw IP packets, and sniffing the traffic on the network card. These actions are required to do the ping.

If you don't want to run your script with root, you can use the capabilities framework. You can give Python the same capabilities as /bin/ping by doing:

sudo setcap cap_net_raw+ep $(readlink -f $(which python))

This will allow Python to capture raw packets, without having to give it full root permission.

If you want to remove the permissions you can do:

sudo setcap -r $(readlink -f $(which python))

You can check that you've removed it with:

sudo getcap $(readlink -f $(which python))

If it doesn't return any output is that it doesn't have any capabilities.

Usage⚑

If you want to see the output immediately, emulating what happens on the terminal, use the verbose flag as below. Otherwise it won't show any information on the stdout.

from pythonping import ping

ping("127.0.0.1", verbose=True)

This will yield the following result.

Reply from 127.0.0.1, 9 bytes in 0.17ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 9 bytes in 0.14ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 9 bytes in 0.12ms
Reply from 127.0.0.1, 9 bytes in 0.12ms

Regardless of the verbose mode, the ping function will always return a ResponseList object. This is a special iterable object, containing a list of Response items. In each Response, you can find the packet received and some meta information, like:

  • error_message: contains a string describing the error this response represents. For example, an error could be “Network Unreachable” or “Fragmentation Required”. If you got a successful response, this property is None..
  • success: is a bool indicating if the response is successful.
  • time_elapsed: and time_elapsed_ms indicate how long it took to receive this response, respectively in seconds and milliseconds..

On top of that, ResponseList adds some intelligence you can access from its own members. The fields are self-explanatory:

  • rtt_min and rtt_min_ms.
  • rtt_max and rtt_max_ms.
  • rtt_avg and rtt_avg_ms.

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 you desire.
  • 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 (bytes).
  • count: specify allows you to define how many ICMP packets to send.
  • interval: the time to wait between pings, 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 (see out) 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).

References⚑