Check for internet connection availability in Swift

As mentioned in the comments, although its possible to use Objective-C libraries in Swift, I wanted a more pure Swift solution. The existing Apple Reachability class and other third party libraries seemed to be too complicated for me to translate to Swift. I Googled some more and I came across this article which shows a simple method to check for network availability. I set out to translate this to Swift. I hit many snags but thanks to Martin R from StackOverflow, I managed to resolve them and finally get a workable solution in Swift. Here is the code.

import Foundation
import SystemConfiguration

public class Reachability {

    class func isConnectedToNetwork() -> Bool {

        var zeroAddress = sockaddr_in(sin_len: 0, sin_family: 0, sin_port: 0, sin_addr: in_addr(s_addr: 0), sin_zero: (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0))
        zeroAddress.sin_len = UInt8(sizeofValue(zeroAddress))
        zeroAddress.sin_family = sa_family_t(AF_INET)

        let defaultRouteReachability = withUnsafePointer(&zeroAddress) {
            SCNetworkReachabilityCreateWithAddress(nil, UnsafePointer($0)).takeRetainedValue()
        }

        var flags: SCNetworkReachabilityFlags = 0
        if SCNetworkReachabilityGetFlags(defaultRouteReachability, &flags) == 0 {
            return false
        }

        let isReachable = (flags & UInt32(kSCNetworkFlagsReachable)) != 0
        let needsConnection = (flags & UInt32(kSCNetworkFlagsConnectionRequired)) != 0

        return isReachable && !needsConnection
    }

}

For Swift > 3.0

public class Reachability {
    public func isConnectedToNetwork() -> Bool {
        var zeroAddress = sockaddr_in()
        zeroAddress.sin_len = UInt8(MemoryLayout<sockaddr_in>.size)
        zeroAddress.sin_family = sa_family_t(AF_INET)

        guard let defaultRouteReachability = withUnsafePointer(to: &zeroAddress, {
            $0.withMemoryRebound(to: sockaddr.self, capacity: 1) {
                SCNetworkReachabilityCreateWithAddress(nil, $0)
            }
        }) else {
            return false
        }

        var flags: SCNetworkReachabilityFlags = []
        if !SCNetworkReachabilityGetFlags(defaultRouteReachability, &flags) {
            return false
        }
        if flags.isEmpty {
            return false
        }

        let isReachable = flags.contains(.reachable)
        let needsConnection = flags.contains(.connectionRequired)

        return (isReachable && !needsConnection)
    }
}

This works for both 3G and WiFi connections. I’ve also uploaded it to my GitHub with a working example.