PHP - Email notification whenever a remote file changes

Question

I was wondering if there\'s a way to have a php script on my web server email me whenever a file from another web server changes.

For instance, there\'s this file t

Answer 1

This code does not check for updates in realtime - it would be pretty much impossible - but every 1 hour/minute.

First, save a file on your system which has the same contents as this. Name it any way, for example paper_items.json.

Now make a file named checkitems.php. Read the file which changes frequently, compare if it's contents are equal to your paper_items.json. If equal, nothing to do, if not, save the online file to your local paper_items.json and use PHP's mail() to email you something like "there was a change".

Finally, set up a cron job to run this every n (for example 1) hour or 1 minute, etc.

Answer 2

Use crontab to setup checking script to run once a minute and compare this file with your locally stored version (or use md5 checksums instead - it will differ if file changes).

file_get_contents('http://url-to-file', 'checkfile.tmp');
if (md5(file_get_contents('lastfile.tmp')) != md5(file_get_contents('checkfile.tmp')))
{
    //copy checkfile to lastfile
    unlink('lastfile.tmp');
    copy('checkfile.tmp', 'lastfile.tmp'); 
    //send email or do something you want ;)
}

Answer 3

You need have this two files in same folder.

• old.json
• scriptForCron.php

In scriptForCron.php write:

$url='http://media1.clubpenguin.com/play/en/web_service/game_configs/paper_items.json';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
$execute = curl_exec($ch);

$fp=fopen('old.json','w+');
$oldjson=fread($fp,filesize('old.json'));

if($execute!=$oldjson){
 mail('your@mail.com','Yoohoo', 'File changed');
 fputs($fp,$execute);
}
fclose($fp);

And then add scriptForCron.php to cron job. You can ask hosting support for it.