download file from ftp using php

Question

I am trying to make a application in which admin will be able to see the files from particular folder(predefined) and should be able to download them one by one. The files will be stored on the server. Can someone guide me how to do this?

Answer 1

Check the file_get_contents function. It does what you need.

For instance:

<?php $file_content = file_get_contents ('ftp://mysite.com/file.txt'); ?>

Then you just need to write the content to the filesystem with file_put_contents or fwrite (as you prefer).

Answer 2

Are you trying to get a list of files in a remote FTP server? If so, then you need either the ftp extension or use the Net-FTP2 extension from PEAR (it has sadly been abandoned, but you may be able to salvage some code from there)

As for serving a specific file that comes from a FTP server to a remote user, I would suggest the readfile function

readfile('ftp://server/file.txt');

Keep in mind, that you also need to add proper headers, like Content-Type, Content-Length, etc, the readfile manual page has some examples.