Check for internet connectivity in NodeJs

While robertklep's solution works, it is far from being the best choice for this. It takes about 3 minutes for dns.resolve to timeout and give an error if you don't have an internet connection, while dns.lookup responds almost instantly with the error ENOTFOUND.

So I made this function:

function checkInternet(cb) {
    require('dns').lookup('google.com',function(err) {
        if (err && err.code == "ENOTFOUND") {
            cb(false);
        } else {
            cb(true);
        }
    })
}

// example usage:
checkInternet(function(isConnected) {
    if (isConnected) {
        // connected to the internet
    } else {
        // not connected to the internet
    }
});

This is by far the fastest way of checking for internet connectivity and it avoids all errors that are not related to internet connectivity.

I had to build something similar in a NodeJS-app some time ago. The way I did it was to first use the networkInterfaces() function is the OS-module and then check if one or more interfaces have a non-internal IP.

If that was true, then I used exec() to start ping with a well-defined server (I like Google's DNS servers). By checking the return value of exec(), I know if ping was sucessful or not. I adjusted the number of pings based on the interface type. Forking a process introduces some overhead, but since this test is not performed too frequently in my app, I can afford it. Also, by using ping and IP-adresses, you dont depend on DNS being configured. Here is an example:

var exec = require('child_process').exec, child;
child = exec('ping -c 1 128.39.36.96', function(error, stdout, stderr){
     if(error !== null)
          console.log("Not available")
      else
          console.log("Available")
});

It's not as foolproof as possible but get the job done:

var dns = require('dns');
dns.lookupService('8.8.8.8', 53, function(err, hostname, service){
  console.log(hostname, service);
    // google-public-dns-a.google.com domain
});

just use a simple if(err) and treat the response adequately. :)

ps.: Please don't bother telling me 8.8.8.8 is not a name to be resolved, it's just a lookup for a highly available dns server from google. The intention is to check connectivity, not name resolution.

A quick and dirty way is to check if Node can resolve www.google.com:

require('dns').resolve('www.google.com', function(err) {
  if (err) {
     console.log("No connection");
  } else {
     console.log("Connected");
  }
});

This isn't entire foolproof, since your RaspPi can be connected to the Internet yet unable to resolve www.google.com for some reason, and you might also want to check err.type to distinguish between 'unable to resolve' and 'cannot connect to a nameserver so the connection might be down').