php download file from remote server, from download url with headers set - php

Question

Im trying to downlaod a file with php that is located on a remote server, and having no luck. Ive tried using fopen, get_file_contents, but nothing has worked.
I am passing in a download URL, which isnt the exact file location, it is the "download url" of the file, which then forces the browser to download.
So Im thinking that is why the file fopen and file_get_contents is failing, can someone tell me what I have to do to download a file from a url with headers set to force file download.
Any help greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

While not technically a duplicate, this has been asked on SO before: How to get redirecting url link with php from bit.ly
Your problem is that file_get_contents does not follow redirects. See the linked answer for a solution.

Answer 2

altough you didnt form your question clearly i think i know what you mean.
try this function taken from php.net comments
didnt test it but it looks good and seems to follow html header redirects as well as meta and javascript redirects to the file.
<?php
/*==================================
Get url content and response headers (given a url, follows all redirections on it and returned content and response headers of final url)
#return array[0] content
array[1] array of response headers
==================================*/
function get_url( $url, $javascript_loop = 0, $timeout = 5 )
{
$url = str_replace( "&", "&", urldecode(trim($url)) );
$cookie = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1" );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "" );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false ); # required for https urls
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10 );
$content = curl_exec( $ch );
$response = curl_getinfo( $ch );
curl_close ( $ch );
if ($response['http_code'] == 301 || $response['http_code'] == 302)
{
ini_set("user_agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1");
if ( $headers = get_headers($response['url']) )
{
foreach( $headers as $value )
{
if ( substr( strtolower($value), 0, 9 ) == "location:" )
return get_url( trim( substr( $value, 9, strlen($value) ) ) );
}
}
}
if ( ( preg_match("/>[[:space:]]+window\.location\.replace\('(.*)'\)/i", $content, $value) || preg_match("/>[[:space:]]+window\.location\=\"(.*)\"/i", $content, $value) ) &&
$javascript_loop < 5
)
{
return get_url( $value[1], $javascript_loop+1 );
}
else
{
return array( $content, $response );
}
}
?>