Download file from URL using CURL

Question

I try to download file using a php-script from an URL like the following:

http://www.xcontest.org/track.php?t=2avxjsv1.igc

The code I use looks like the following, but it produces empty download files only:

$DLFile= "testfile.igc";
$DLURL="http://www.xcontest.org/track.php?t=2avxjsv1.igc"; 
$fp = fopen ($DLFile, 'w+');
$ch = curl_init($DLURL);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

An other strange thing is when entering the URL in the web browser I don't get the file. It can I could only download the file when clicking the link on the web site!.

Any advice is very appreciated!

Answer 1

@Chris' answer works, but this seems to work better to download very large files without running out of memory, since it doesn't download the whole file into a variable before writing to disk:

$file_url = 'http://www.test.com/images/avatar.png';
$destination_path = "downloads/avatar.png";

$fp = fopen($destination_path, "w+");

$ch = curl_init($file_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_exec($ch);
$st_code = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

if($st_code == 200)
 echo 'File downloaded successfully!';
else
 echo 'Error downloading file!';

Source: https://www.kodingmadesimple.com/2018/02/php-download-file-from-url-curl.html