Does file_get_contents() have a timeout setting?

Question

The default timeout is defined by default_socket_timeout ini-setting, which is 60 seconds. You can also change it on the fly:

ini_set('default_socket_timeout', 900); // 900 Seconds = 15 Minutes

Another way to set a timeout, would be to use stream_context_create to set the timeout as HTTP context options of the HTTP stream wrapper in use:

$ctx = stream_context_create(array('http'=>
    array(
        'timeout' => 1200,  //1200 Seconds is 20 Minutes
    )
));

echo file_get_contents('http://example.com/', false, $ctx);

As @diyism mentioned, "default_socket_timeout, stream_set_timeout, and stream_context_create timeout are all the timeout of every line read/write, not the whole connection timeout." And the top answer by @stewe has failed me.

As an alternative to using file_get_contents, you can always use curl with a timeout.

So here's a working code that works for calling links.

$url='http://example.com/';
$ch=curl_init();
$timeout=5;

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);

$result=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $result;

Yes! By passing a stream context in the third parameter:

Here with a timeout of 1s:

file_get_contents("https://abcedef.com", 0, stream_context_create(["http"=>["timeout"=>1]]));

Source in comment section of https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php

HTTP context options:

method
header
user_agent
content
request_fulluri
follow_location
max_redirects
protocol_version
timeout

Non HTTP stream contexts

Socket
FTP
SSL
CURL
Phar
Context (notifications callback)
Zip

It is worth noting that if changing default_socket_timeout on the fly, it might be useful to restore its value after your file_get_contents call:

$default_socket_timeout = ini_get('default_socket_timeout');
....
ini_set('default_socket_timeout', 10);
file_get_contents($url);
...
ini_set('default_socket_timeout', $default_socket_timeout);

For me work when i change my php.ini in my host:

; Default timeout for socket based streams (seconds)
default_socket_timeout = 300