Need php script to download a file on a remote server and save locally

Question

Trying to download a file on a remote server and save it to a local subdirectory.

The following code seems to work for small files, < 1MB, but larger files just time out and don't even begin to download.

<?php

 $source = "http://someurl.com/afile.zip";
 $destination = "/asubfolder/afile.zip";

 $data = file_get_contents($source);
 $file = fopen($destination, "w+");
 fputs($file, $data);
 fclose($file);

?>

Any suggestions on how to download larger files without interruption?

Answer 1

$ch = curl_init();
$source = "http://someurl.com/afile.zip";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $source);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);

$destination = "/asubfolder/afile.zip";
$file = fopen($destination, "w+");
fputs($file, $data);
fclose($file);

Answer 2

file_get_contents shouldn't be used for big binary files because you can easily hit PHP's memory limit. I would exec() wget by telling it the URL and the desired output filename:

exec("wget $url -O $filename");

Answer 3

Since PHP 5.1.0, file_put_contents() supports writing piece-by-piece by passing a stream-handle as the $data parameter:

file_put_contents("Tmpfile.zip", fopen("http://someurl/file.zip", 'r'));