Ping Companies House service

Best practice to ping Companies House service to check up time.

Is there any API built to ping Companies House?

I am still waiting for a response - can somebody contact me?
@mfairhurst ??

No, there is no ‘PING’ available through the API.

Just as a follow up to this.

There is a way to call the service to ensure it is available, this can be done by curling the
API health check endpoint. An example of how this can be done is:

curl -vvv -k -X GET -H “Authorisation” -H “Cache-Control: no-cache” -H “Postman token” https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/healthcheck

This should return a 200 status.

@KDJones I tried your solution, but it is not working

I think @KDJones command above should read:

curl -v -k -X GET -H "Authorisation" -H "Cache-Control: no-cache" -H "Postman token" https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/healthcheck

…that’s just a single “-v” flag for (–verbose) not “-vvv” as the original had it. I think I still got a response using the original line however…

This produces a lot of output, a shorter response would be using:

curl -I -k -X GET -H "Authorisation" -H "Cache-Control: no-cache" -H "Postman token" https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/healthcheck

That gives me:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2018 10:22:47 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 0
Connection: keep-alive
Server: CompaniesHouse

So as @KDJones says this returns a 200 status.

I don’t think you need curl specifically - although it or an equivalent are likely to be available as a library in your chosen language. If you want to use it from the command line as a test (free) see the curl homepage or the curl documentation.

I’ve only tested this on the command line. I haven’t yet seen any other status (good!) to verify what exactly happens when the servers are down. However it seems general and simple enough for me now.

@muhammadadeel118 (sigh) It’s not my business and we’re all busy people but if you have a problem it’s almost always helpful to give more info rather than less. E.g. rather than “it’s not working” something like “I want to achieve {overall goal}. I’m trying to do this by {CH endpoint / method / algorithm / command}. The steps I took were {List of what you did with any response / errors you received}. {If something was unexpected:} I expected {x} to happen but {y} happened.”

These sites explain it better than I can:
Short, self-contained correct example (http://sscce.org/)
How to write a good bug report (http://noverse.com/blog/2012/06/how-to-write-a-good-bug-report/)