How to Send File over secure FTP SSL Protocol

Question

I appreciate any help that can be offered on the subject. At the end of an online enrollment, I am taking customer data (several fields), putting them in a CSV file and trying to submit to another client over SSL protocol but have no idea how this is done. I am also storing the information on a local database and am hoping the process is somewhat similar.

I have already been sent links to view the SSH2 instructions from php.net SSN2

but to be honest this is like reading Chinese to me. I do not understand the instructions and am not looking to install any extensions, modify the PHP.ini file or anything of the sort (especially since we do not own the server the information is being sent through).

Is there a simple, secure way of transmitting this file to the SSL protocol provided to us?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Perhaps you could use *ftp_ssl_connect* for that matter, which is used to open a secure SSL-FTP connection, and to upload a file is just a straight forward process, just create the connection to the server, and put the file up there. A basic example could be:

//Create your connection
$ftp_conn = ftp_ssl_connect( $host, $you_can_provide_a_port );

//Login
$login_result = ftp_login($ftp_conn, $user, $pass);

if( $login_result )
{
    //Set passive mode
    ftp_pasv( $ftp_conn, true );
    // Transfer file
    $transfer_result = ftp_put( $ftp_conn, $dest_file_path, $source_file_path, FTP_BINARY );

    //Verify if transfer was successfully made
    if( $transfer_result)
    {
        echo "Success";
    }
    else
    {
        echo "An error occured";
    }
}

For reference purposes http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ftp-ssl-connect.php

Answer 2

The only way I've managed to do ftp over SSL using php was to use php's exec() function to execute a curl command. PHP's curl library would not work because at the time, the skip-pasv-ip option did not exist and it was something that was absolutely required. Something like:

curl --user <username:password> --disable-epsv --ftp-pasv --ftp-skip-pasv-ip --ftp-ssl --sslv2  --cert <path/to/certificate> -T <path/to/uploadfile> <hostname>

You may need to modify the curl options to suit your needs.