PHP FTP recursive directory listing

Question

I\'m trying to make a recursive function to get all the directories and sub directories from my ftp server in an array.

I tried a lot of functions I\'ve found on the

Answer 1

If your server supports MLSD command and you have PHP 7.2 or newer, you can use ftp_mlsd function:

function ftp_mlsd_recursive($ftp_stream, $directory)
{
    $result = [];

    $files = ftp_mlsd($ftp_stream, $directory);
    if ($files === false)
    {
        die("Cannot list $directory");
    }

    foreach ($files as $file)
    { 
        $name = $file["name"];
        $filepath = $directory . "/" . $name;
        if (($file["type"] == "cdir") || ($file["type"] == "pdir"))
        {
            // noop
        }
        else if ($file["type"] == "dir")
        {
            $result = array_merge($result, ftp_mlsd_recursive($ftp_stream, $filepath));
        }
        else
        {
            $result[] = $filepath;
        }
    } 
    return $result;
} 

If you do not have PHP 7.2, you can try to implement the MLSD command on your own. For a start, see user comment of the ftp_rawlist command:
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ftp-rawlist.php#101071

---

If you cannot use MLSD, you will particularly have problems telling if an entry is a file or folder. While you can use the ftp_size trick, calling ftp_size for each entry can take ages.

But if you need to work against one specific FTP server only, you can use ftp_rawlist to retrieve a file listing in a platform-specific format and parse that.

The following code assumes a common *nix format.

function ftp_nlst_recursive($ftp_stream, $directory)
{
    $result = [];

    $lines = ftp_rawlist($ftp_stream, $directory);
    if ($lines === false)
    {
        die("Cannot list $directory");
    }

    foreach ($lines as $line)
    {
        $tokens = preg_split("/\s+/", $line, 9);
        $name = $tokens[8];
        $type = $tokens[0][0];
        $filepath = $directory . "/" . $name;

        if ($type == 'd')
        {
            $result = array_merge($result, ftp_nlst_recursive($ftp_stream, $filepath));
        }
        else
        {
            $result[] = $filepath;
        }
    }
    return $result;
}

For DOS format, see: Get directory structure from FTP using PHP.

Answer 2

This code a variation of Martin Prikryl one. It is slower but do not have any failures with whitespaces. Use this code only if you have any problems with the code above.

function ftp_list_files_recursive($ftp_stream, $path){
    $lines = ftp_nlist($ftp_stream, $path);
    $result = array();
    foreach ($lines as $line) {
        if (ftp_size($ftp_stream, $line) == -1) {
            $result = array_merge($result, ftp_list_files_recursive($ftp_stream, $line));
        }
        else{
            $result[] = $line;
        }
    }
    return $result;
}

Answer 3

I've build an OOP FTP Client library that's can help you on this a lot, using just this code you can retrieve a list of only the directories with addition useful information like (chmod, last modified time, size ...).

The code :

// Connection
$connection = new FtpConnection("localhost", "foo", "12345");
$connection->open();
        
// FtpConfig
$config = new FtpConfig($connection);
$config->setPassive(true);

$client = new FtpClient($connection);

$allFolders =
    // directory, recursive, filter
    $client->listDirectoryDetails('/', true, FtpClient::DIR_TYPE); 

// Do whatever you want with the folders