Currently I have a script like the following:
<?php
$filename = "http://someurl.com/file.ext";
header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$filename);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 500);
$data=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $data;
?>
The problem is that the server just send the response after download the whole file. I want to make it work like a "stream", sending chunks of data as response while the file is downloaded.
Is that possible to achieve with PHP and cURL?
It's possible. You can use the curl option CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION
to specify a callback where you'll receive chunks of data so you can send them directly to the client as curl downloads the file.
<?php
$filename = "http://someurl.com/file.ext";
header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . basename($filename) . '"');
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$filename);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 500);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, function($curl, $data) {
echo $data;
return strlen($data);
});
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
Curl will by default output the response directly, unless you specify CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER
.
Your code will work just by removing CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER
and the last echo
:
<?php
$filename = "http://someurl.com/file.ext";
header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$filename);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 500);
$data=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>