Question about FTP() function

fredriksk

Hello all!

I have a question about the FTP() function.

I want to use this functions to get an graphic interface to my FTP. My question is:

How do the traffic go from the FTP server to the user?

If a user request a file from my FTP. Does it transfer via my webbhotel or does the FTP function establish a connection from the FTP server directly to the klient computor?

I hope I made myself clear?...

hmm... mayby not....

cakkafracle

I too wish to know this.

I suppose if I just went ahead and wrote the darn script I'd find out for myself

but perhaps it'll save me time if I know how this sort of thing is handled

diego25

Suppose that the server that has your PHP scripts is server1 and the server that has the FTP server is called server2. If you use the FTP functions in a PHP script in server1, the only thing you can do is download a file from server2, which has the FTP server, to server1. Therefore, you cannot use the FTP functions in PHP to send a file to the user. You can only transfer files between the FTP server and your server.

If you want to send the file to the user, it will have to be in the form of a HTTP download.

Diego

fredriksk

ok!

But what if I use a combination of FTP() and HTTP download?

If I use the FTP function to present the avaliable files (and the file structure) and the presented files is links in witch the user gets to download the file with HTTP download?

Could this work?

diego25

Is it a public FTP server? If it is, then just link to the FTP server. Most browsers nowadays can do the directory listing of an FTP directory by themselves, so you don't need PHP to do it.

If it's not a public server, then yes, what you said would work. But it may take a while to download, because the script will have to download the file from the FTP server, and then wait until the HTTP download is finished. So make sure your max execution time is set high enough to account for this.

Diego

cakkafracle

But you can't normally upload to an http connection through a basic [url]ftp://domain.com/[/url] connection... just download.

What I'm doing right now is:

user logs in. If an FTP connection is established, login successful, then a file listing is presented through listDirectory(); (I made this), each item wrapped in a ?download=filename url. the users name/password is stored in the session.

When the user clicks on one, I send an ftp_get() with that filename, and it downloads into a temp directory (which is web accessible)

upon which I fire a header("Location: http://path/to/temp/".$filename);

this should download the file to the user.

As for upload, I have a file uploader for, your basic stuff, which uploads the file to the temp folder, then ftp_put() sends it up to the server.
Hopefully in the right spot.

Once done, the listDirectory() is run and the newly updated file should be presented.

Is this just silly or what?

One problem: if the file is a typical jpg or gif or something the browser recognizes, rather that downloading it, the browser show renders it to the screen.

How can you force an image file to download to a user?

you can't eh?

You'd have to zip or tar the file or something...?