Download from Laravel storage without loading whole file in memory

Question

I am using Laravel Storage and I want to serve users some (larger than memory limit) files. My code was inspired from a post in SO and it goes like this:

$fs         


        

Answer 1

Instead of loading the whole file into memory at once, try to use fread to read and send it chunk by chunk.

Here is a very good article: http://zinoui.com/blog/download-large-files-with-php

getDriver();

$fileName = 'bigfile';

$metaData = $fs->getMetadata($fileName);
$handle = $fs->readStream($fileName);

header('Pragma: public');
header('Expires: 0');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
header('Cache-Control: private', false);
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . $metaData['path'] . '";');
header('Content-Type: ' . $metaData['type']);

/*
    I've commented the following line out.
    Because \League\Flysystem\Filesystem uses int for file size
    For file size larger than PHP_INT_MAX (2147483647) bytes
    It may return 0, which results in:

        Content-Length: 0

    and it stops the browser from downloading the file.

    Try to figure out a way to get the file size represented by a string.
    (e.g. using shell command/3rd party plugin?)
*/

//header('Content-Length: ' . $metaData['size']);


$chunkSize = 1024 * 1024;

while (!feof($handle)) {
    $buffer = fread($handle, $chunkSize);
    echo $buffer;
    ob_flush();
    flush();
}

fclose($handle);
exit;
?>

---

Update

A simpler way to do this: just call

if (ob_get_level()) ob_end_clean();

before returning a response.

Credit to @Christiaan

//disable execution time limit when downloading a big file.
set_time_limit(0);

/** @var \League\Flysystem\Filesystem $fs */
$fs = Storage::disk('local')->getDriver();

$fileName = 'bigfile';

$metaData = $fs->getMetadata($fileName);
$stream = $fs->readStream($fileName);

if (ob_get_level()) ob_end_clean();

return response()->stream(
    function () use ($stream) {
        fpassthru($stream);
    },
    200,
    [
        'Content-Type' => $metaData['type'],
        'Content-disposition' => 'attachment; filename="' . $metaData['path'] . '"',
    ]);