Best way to download a file in PHP

Question

Which would be the best way to download a file from another domain in PHP? i.e. A zip file.

Answer 1

cURL

here is an example.

Answer 2

The easiest one is file_get_contents(), a more advanced way would be with cURL for example. You can store the data to your harddrive with file_put_contents().

Answer 3

normally, the fopen functions work for remote files too, so you could do the following to circumvent the memory limit (but it's slower than file_get_contents)

<?php
$handle = fopen("http://www.example.com/", "rb");
$fp = fopen($localfile, 'w');
$contents = '';
while (!feof($handle)) {
  $content = fread($handle, 8192);
  fwrite($fp, $content);
}
fclose($handle);
fclose($fp);
?>

copied from here: http://www.php.net/fread