PHP append to file on other server - php

Question

I want to append data to a file that is on another server.
Was wondering if the code below will work:
$fp = fopen('http://192.168.2.34:1234/Planet/data.txt', 'a+');
fwrite($fp, $successString);
fwrite($fp, '/n');
fclose($fp);

Answer 1

I'll spoil it: no, it won't work. There needs to be a service that handles the HTTP connection on the other end, which may then itself write something to a file. You cannot access files on remote hard disks directly over HTTP. And thank god for it.

Answer 2

One of the options for writing a file to a remote sever using something like the above would be using FTP access with allow_url_fopen enabled in php.ini and like follows:
<?php
$file = fopen ("ftp://ftp.example.com/incoming/outputfile", "w");
if (!$file) {
echo "<p>Unable to open remote file for writing.\n";
exit;
}
/* Write the data here. */
fwrite ($file, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . "\n");
fclose ($file);
?>
Source: http://php.net/manual/en/features.remote-files.php
However the source also states:
Note: You might get the idea from the example above that you can use this technique to write to a remote log file. Unfortunately that would not work because the fopen() call will fail if the remote file already exists. To do distributed logging like that, you should take a look at syslog().
Therefore you cannot append using the above method, if you are sending a system log message to a remote server use syslog() as this is designing for that purpose.
Of the top of my head, you could potentially use something like SSH if on a linux machine or cygwin if on a Windows machine on either side to append to a file using PHP. But you would need SSH access to the remote machine.
if (!function_exists("ssh2_connect")) die("function ssh2_connect doesn't exist"); // log in at server1.example.com on port 22 if(!($con
= ssh2_connect("server1.example.com", 22))){
echo "fail: unable to establish connection\n"; } else {
// try to authenticate with username root, password secretpassword
if(!ssh2_auth_password($con, "root", "secretpassword")) {
echo "fail: unable to authenticate\n";
} else {
// allright, we're in!
echo "okay: logged in...\n";
// execute a command
if (!($stream = ssh2_exec($con, "EXECUTE SSH COMMAND HERE TO APPEND" ))) {
echo "fail: unable to execute command\n";
} else {
// collect returning data from command
stream_set_blocking($stream, true);
$data = "";
while ($buf = fread($stream,4096)) {
$data .= $buf;
}
fclose($stream);
}
} }
Source: http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/article/make_ssh_connections_with_php/
p.s. The reason you cannot do what you are asking in your example above in that scenario, is that if it were possible, ANYONE would be able to write to files on any server. As you can imagine this would be a great security risk!

Answer 3

You cannot do this; you'd probably get an error message like this:
PHP Warning: fopen(http://example.com/data.txt): failed to open stream: HTTP wrapper does not support writeable connections