I'm trying to archive a big file using PHP and send it to the browser for download. The problem is the file is located on a remote machine and the only way to get it is via HTTP. So imagine this is my file: https://dropboxcontent.com/user333/3yjdsgf/video1.mp4
It's a direct link and I can download the file using wget, or curl anything. When a user wants to download it, I first fetch the file to the server, then zip it up and then send it to the user. Well, if the file is really large, the user has to sit there waiting for the server to download it before he sees the download dialog box in his browser. Is there a way for me to start the download of the file https://dropboxcontent.com/user333/3yjdsgf/video1.mp4 (let's say I'm downloading it into a local /tmp/video.mp4) and simultaneously start putting into an archive and streaming it into the user's browser?
I'm using this library to zip it up: https://github.com/barracudanetworks/ArchiveStream-php, which works great, but the bottleneck is still fetching the file to the server's local filesystem.
Here is my code:
$f = file_get_contents("https://dropboxcontent.com/user333/3yjdsgf/video1.mp4");
$zip->add_file('big/hello.mp4', $f);
The problem is line $f = file_get_contents("https://dropboxcontent.com/user333/3yjdsgf/video1.mp4"); takes too long if the file is really big.
As suggested in the comments of the original post by Touch Cat Digital Inc, I found the answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6914986/1927991
A chunked stream of the remote file was the answer. Very clever.
Related
I am currently trying to retrieve a file from an FTP-Server in order to make it accessible for the user to download. ftp_get() writes it to a path on the local machine, yes, but what I want is that it also shows up in the download history and counts as "normal" download from the internet but I didn't figure out how to do this yet. I also tried to link directly to the file in PHP with header("Location: ftp://username:password#ftp.server.com/myfile.file") but this was resulting in the browser showing the files contents (which I didn't want). Did I miss any header-Parameters ? Or is there a completely different way to do this ?
You won't be able to "redirect" a user to a file so he can download it using FTP. This is a HTTP-thing. Browsers provides FTP features and make it look like HTTP but, in fact, those are different stuff.
If this file is only accessible through FTP and it is on a remote server, the only way I can imagine so you cand 'redirect' this download to the user is:
Download the file from the FTP to your application server through FTP in PHP;
Send it to the user using PHP and appropriate file headers, something like this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/7263943/2802720
Hope it helps.
I'm trying to serve a file for download to a user, and I'm having trouble with fpassthru. The function I'm using to download a file is:
http://pastebin.com/eXDpgUqq
Note that the file is successfully created from a blob, and is in fact the file I want the user to download. The script exits successfully, and reports no errors, but the file is not downloaded. I can't for the life of me think what's wrong.
EDIT: I removed the error suppression from fopen(), but it still reports no error. Somehow the data in the output buffer is never being told to be downloaded by the browser.
I tried your code (without the blob part), and it worked fine. I can download a binary file. Based on my experience, here are something to check:
Has the file been completely saved before you initiate the reading? Check the return value of file_put_contents.
How large is the file? fpassthru reads the whole file into memory. If the file is too large, memory might be insufficient. Please refer to http://board.phpbuilder.com/showthread.php?10330609-RESOLVED-php-driven-file-download-using-fpassthru for more information.
Instead of downloading the file to local server (reading the whole file into server’s memory, and letting the client download the file from the server), you can create an SAS URL, and simply redirect the browser to the URL. Azure will take care of download automatically. You many want to refer to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/azureossds/archive/2015/05/12/generating-shared-access-signature-sas-using-php.aspx for a sample.
I was able to download the file by passing a stream obtained with the Azure API directly to fpassthru, without creating a file. Unfortunately, I can't show the code because it belongs to a project that I have finished working on and the code is no longer available to me.
I have a url that downloads a .csv file to my computer like this
http://oi62.tinypic.com/2nh0zzt.jpg
The url is
api.infortisa.com/api/Tarifa/GetFile?user=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
But what I want is to download that file in a folder of the server, or at least open it's content so I can save it where i want.
(upload that file via FTP every time is a pain)
I can't access the direct url of the file, just what the api gives me, and that is just a direct download.
I tried curl and file_get_contents, but nothing seems to work.
How can I download that file in the server instead of my computer?
Any help would be appreciated.
I am trying to read and write a remote a file to the user's browser through CodeIgniter(FTP Class). That is, I want user to read the file edit the content and save it back.
One way will be
- download the file to my server
- read the file and echo to the user(Browser)
- Save the content of the file to local copy(My server)
- upload the file back to the server
But I don't want to download the file to my server I just want to read and write to remote file
You can write it to the temporary file and after displaying just delete it using unlink() function in the same script. Just call it straight after echoing the content. The file will be present on your server for a really short period of time. FTP is used to upload files, but not for editing them remotely. Any FTP client supporting file edit is actually saving it to the temp folder on your computer and after the edit uploads it back to the server.
hy guys,
i really need your help. i've succesfully connected to ftp server via php.
i'm listing all files that are on the server. if i click a file the browser should prompt a download window to download the file.
i've absolutely no idea how to do that. which method am i going to use. ftp_get kind of confuses me. it says i have to declare a local_file as well. i just want a file on the server to download to my harddrive.
how can i do that?
regards matt
The remote file has to first be downloaded to your server before you can send it to the user. It's invisible to the user, but you don't have a choice. PHP won't let the browser talk directly to the FTP server.
Create a separate php script that calls ftp_get for a specific file, stores it temporarily to your server to allow the user to download it.
Something like:
<?php
//assume the page was called like download.php?filename=downloaded.pdf
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$_GET['filename'].'"');
$tempFile = 'temp'.rand();
ftp_get($ftp, $tempFile, $_GET['filename'], FTP_BINARY);
readfile($tempFile);
You may add code to delete the tempFile too.
If you provide a link to a file that can't be read by the browser (such as a php file, audio, video, etc.) it will ask you to download the file.
The other way is to use PHP headers on a page and print out the page, and link to that page. http://www.ryboe.com/tutorials/php-headers-force-download