Stream FTP download to output

Question

I am trying to stream/pipe a file to the user\'s browser through HTTP from FTP. That is, I am trying to print the contents of a file on an FTP server.

This is what

Answer 1

I know this is old, but some may still think it's useful.

I've tried your solution on a Windows environment, and it worked almost perfectly:

$conn_id = ftp_connect($host);
ftp_login($conn_id, $user, $pass) or die();

$sockets = stream_socket_pair(STREAM_PF_INET, STREAM_SOCK_STREAM,
        STREAM_IPPROTO_IP) or die();

stream_set_write_buffer($sockets[0], 0);
stream_set_timeout($sockets[1], 0);

set_time_limit(0);
$status = ftp_nb_fget($conn_id, $sockets[0], $filename, FTP_BINARY);

while ($status === FTP_MOREDATA) {
    echo stream_get_contents($sockets[1]);
    flush();
    $status = ftp_nb_continue($conn_id);
}
echo stream_get_contents($sockets[1]);
flush();

fclose($sockets[0]);
fclose($sockets[1]);

I used STREAM_PF_INET instead of STREAM_PF_UNIX because of Windows, and it worked flawlessly... until the last chunk, which was false for no apparent reason, and I couldn't understand why. So the output was missing the last part.

So I decided to use another approach:

$ctx = stream_context_create();
stream_context_set_params($ctx, array('notification' =>
        function($code, $sev, $message, $msgcode, $bytes, $length) {
    switch ($code) {
        case STREAM_NOTIFY_CONNECT:
            // Connection estabilished
            break;
        case STREAM_NOTIFY_FILE_SIZE_IS:
            // Getting file size
            break;
        case STREAM_NOTIFY_PROGRESS:
            // Some bytes were transferred
            break;
        default: break;
    }
}));
@readfile("ftp://$user:$pass@$host/$filename", false, $ctx);

This worked like a charm with PHP 5.4.5. The bad part is that you can't catch the transferred data, only the chunk size.