Question

hy guys,
i really need your help. i’ve succesfully connected to ftp server via php.
i’m listing all files that are on the server. if i click a file the browser should prompt a download window to download the file.

i’ve absolutely no idea how to do that. which method am i going to use. ftp_get kind of confuses me. it says i have to declare a local_file as well. i just want a file on the server to download to my harddrive.

how can i do that?

regards matt

Answer 1

The remote file has to first be downloaded to your server before you can send it to the user. It’s invisible to the user, but you don’t have a choice. PHP won’t let the browser talk directly to the FTP server.

Create a separate php script that calls ftp_get for a specific file, stores it temporarily to your server to allow the user to download it.

Something like:

<?php
//assume the page was called like download.php?filename=downloaded.pdf
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$_GET['filename'].'"');
$tempFile = 'temp'.rand();
ftp_get($ftp, $tempFile, $_GET['filename'], FTP_BINARY);

readfile($tempFile);

You may add code to delete the tempFile too.