Question

[PHP] Initiate an FTP Download [Will give A++]

Asked by: drakeshe

Hello,
Our business has an FTP for users to download updated versions of software. Thing is though that we don't want them to have the ability to download other versions than the ones we specify.

What I have done though is created a user database where they can login and we have a list of files that they ARE allowed to download.
What we want though is the ability for the user to click a link and they are connected to the FTP and a download is initiated for that specific file.

Our FTP server has usernames & passwords.

Does anyone have any suggestions or examples of how this can be done?
Thank you in advance.

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Asked On
2009-08-31 at 23:07:08ID24697075
Tags

PHP FTP download force

Topics

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

,

PHP Scripting Language

,

Scripting Languages

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
9

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Answers

 

by: racmail2001Posted on 2009-08-31 at 23:32:00ID: 25228974

if the ftp username and password it's specific to each user then you can make the links like this

ftp://user:pass@my.ftpserver.com/fileToDownload.zip

if the ftp username and password it's yours and you do not need the user to know it then you can make a link to a php file that will stream the file to the user so the script will connect to the ftp and read the file and sendit to the user

depending on the size of the file this can be done in many ways

for a small file <20 mb you can do somenthing like this 

$url=urlencode('ftp://user:pass@my.ftpserver.com/fileToDownload.zip');
$filename='test.zip';
$zip=file_get_contents($url);
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=$filename"); 
header("Content-Description: PHP5 Generated Data" );
header("Content-Length: ".strlen($zip));
print $zip;
                                              
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by: drakeshePosted on 2009-08-31 at 23:40:19ID: 25229017

Our files are often 1GB+.
The usernames & passwords for the FTP are static. We have a PHP login system that they will use to download the file through. Thank you very much.

I think what I will do is open up an hidden iFrame with the download FTP URL.

 

by: drakeshePosted on 2009-08-31 at 23:40:51ID: 31622886

Thanks!

 

by: drakeshePosted on 2009-08-31 at 23:42:03ID: 25229021

Oh, dang, just realized, is there a way to get file information like filesize and if exists from the FTP?

 

by: racmail2001Posted on 2009-08-31 at 23:46:18ID: 25229036

you can work directly from php with the ftp also
for bigfiles you can use the ftp functions available in php
please read this http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.ftp.php

 

by: racmail2001Posted on 2009-08-31 at 23:47:25ID: 25229043

for the filesize you can use this script

<?php
 
$file = 'somefile.txt';
 
// set up basic connection
$conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server);
 
// login with username and password
$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);
 
// get the size of $file
$res = ftp_size($conn_id, $file);
 
if ($res != -1) {
    echo "size of $file is $res bytes";
} else {
    echo "couldn't get the size";
}
 
// close the connection
ftp_close($conn_id);
 
?>
                                              
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by: drakeshePosted on 2009-08-31 at 23:49:42ID: 25229052

Thank you once again for your help. Much appreciated.

 

by: drakeshePosted on 2009-09-13 at 19:04:26ID: 25322663

Im still not getting this to work...
ftp://username:password@example.com works fine with Mozilla Firefox, but doesn't work for IE. I've done research and found that IE does not allow login via URL since v4.
I also am unable to do the PHP forwarding method because of the slow speeds of the FTP and the user having to wait 40-70 minutes for download to start. Any other suggestions as to how to initiate a download client side? I considered Java, but do not know how and also compatibility is not good. I need full compatibility.

 

by: drakeshePosted on 2009-09-13 at 19:09:41ID: 25322670

EDIT TO THE ABOVE COMMENT...
I Figured out what was going wrong... My URL wasnt properly encoded and thus creating an error URL...

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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