Getting HTTP code in PHP using curl

// must set $url first....
$http = curl_init($url);
// do your curl thing here
$result = curl_exec($http);
$http_status = curl_getinfo($http, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($http);
echo $http_status;

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST,false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
$rt = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);
echo $info["http_code"];

First make sure if the URL is actually valid (a string, not empty, good syntax), this is quick to check server side. For example, doing this first could save a lot of time:

if(!$url || !is_string($url) || ! preg_match('/^http(s)?:\/\/[a-z0-9-]+(.[a-z0-9-]+)*(:[0-9]+)?(\/.*)?$/i', $url)){
    return false;
}

Make sure you only fetch the headers, not the body content:

@curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER  , true);  // we want headers
@curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY  , true);  // we don't need body

For more details on getting the URL status http code I refer to another post I made (it also helps with following redirects):

• How can I check if a URL exists via PHP?

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As a whole:

$url = 'http://www.example.com';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);    // we want headers
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);    // we don't need body
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,10);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);

echo 'HTTP code: ' . $httpcode;