How to evaluate http response codes from bash/shell script?

Question

I haven't tested this on a 500 code, but it works on others like 200, 302 and 404.

response=$(curl --write-out '%{http_code}' --silent --output /dev/null servername)

Note, format provided for --write-out should be quoted. As suggested by @ibai, add --head to make a HEAD only request. This will save time when the retrieval is successful since the page contents won't be transmitted.

curl --write-out "%{http_code}\n" --silent --output /dev/null "$URL"

works. If not, you have to hit return to view the code itself.

I needed to demo something quickly today and came up with this. Thought I would place it here if someone needed something similar to the OP's request.

#!/bin/bash

status_code=$(curl --write-out %{http_code} --silent --output /dev/null www.bbc.co.uk/news)

if [[ "$status_code" -ne 200 ]] ; then
  echo "Site status changed to $status_code" | mail -s "SITE STATUS CHECKER" "[email protected]" -r "STATUS_CHECKER"
else
  exit 0
fi

This will send an email alert on every state change from 200, so it's dumb and potentially greedy. To improve this, I would look at looping through several status codes and performing different actions dependant on the result.

Although the accepted response is a good answer, it overlooks failure scenarios. curl will return 000 if there is an error in the request or there is a connection failure.

url='http://localhost:8080/'
status=$(curl --head --location --connect-timeout 5 --write-out %{http_code} --silent --output /dev/null ${url})
[[ $status == 500 ]] || [[ $status == 000 ]] && echo restarting ${url} # do start/restart logic

Note: this goes a little beyond the requested 500 status check to also confirm that curl can even connect to the server (i.e. returns 000).

Create a function from it:

failureCode() {
    local url=${1:-http://localhost:8080}
    local code=${2:-500}
    local status=$(curl --head --location --connect-timeout 5 --write-out %{http_code} --silent --output /dev/null ${url})
    [[ $status == ${code} ]] || [[ $status == 000 ]]
}

Test getting a 500:

failureCode http://httpbin.org/status/500 && echo need to restart

Test getting error/connection failure (i.e. 000):

failureCode http://localhost:77777 && echo need to start

Test not getting a 500:

failureCode http://httpbin.org/status/400 || echo not a failure

With netcat and awk you can handle the server response manually:

if netcat 127.0.0.1 8080 <<EOF | awk 'NR==1{if ($2 == "500") exit 0; exit 1;}'; then
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com

EOF

    apache2ctl restart;
fi

To follow 3XX redirects and print response codes for all requests:

HTTP_STATUS="$(curl -IL --silent example.com | grep HTTP )";    
echo "${HTTP_STATUS}";