Making HEAD request in Ruby

I am kind of new to ruby and from a python background I want to make a head request to a URL and check some information like if the file exists on the server and timestamp, etag etc.,I am not able to get this done in RUBY.

In Python:

import httplib2
print httplib2.Http().request('url.com/file.xml','HEAD')

In Ruby: I tried this and throwing some error

require 'net/http'

Net::HTTP.start('url.com'){|http|
   response = http.head('/file.xml')
}
puts response


SocketError: getaddrinfo: nodename nor servname provided, or not known
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:877:in `initialize'
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:877:in `open'
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:877:in `block in connect'
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/timeout.rb:51:in `timeout'
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:876:in `connect'
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:861:in `do_start'
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:850:in `start'
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/2.0.0/net/http.rb:582:in `start'
    from (irb):2
    from /Users/comcast/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p0/bin/irb:16:in `<main>'

Solution

I don't think that passing in a string to :start is enough; in the docs it looks like it requires a URI object's host and port for a correct address:

uri = URI('http://example.com/some_path?query=string')

Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port) do |http|
  request = Net::HTTP::Get.new uri

  response = http.request request # Net::HTTPResponse object
end

You can try this:

require 'net/http'

url = URI('yoururl.com')

Net::HTTP.start(url.host, url.port){|http|
   response = http.head('/file.xml')
   puts response
}

One thing I noticed - your puts response needs to be inside the block! Otherwise, the variable response is not in scope.

Edit: You can also treat the response as a hash to get the values of the headers:

response.each_value { |value| puts value }