Streaming a large file using PHP

Question

I have a 200MB file that I want to give to a user via download. However, since we want the user to only download this file once, we are doing this:

echo file_get_contents('http://some.secret.location.com/secretfolder/the_file.tar.gz'); 

to force a download. However, this means that the whole file has to be loaded in memory, which usually doesn't work. How can we stream this file to them, at some kb per chunk?

Answer 1

Try something like this (source http://teddy.fr/2007/11/28/how-serve-big-files-through-php/):

<?php define('CHUNK_SIZE', 1024*1024); // Size (in bytes) of tiles chunk  // Read a file and display its content chunk by chunk function readfile_chunked($filename, $retbytes = TRUE) {     $buffer = '';     $cnt    = 0;     $handle = fopen($filename, 'rb');      if ($handle === false) {         return false;     }      while (!feof($handle)) {         $buffer = fread($handle, CHUNK_SIZE);         echo $buffer;         ob_flush();         flush();          if ($retbytes) {             $cnt += strlen($buffer);         }     }      $status = fclose($handle);      if ($retbytes && $status) {         return $cnt; // return num. bytes delivered like readfile() does.     }      return $status; }  // Here goes your code for checking that the user is logged in // ... // ...  if ($logged_in) {     $filename = 'path/to/your/file';     $mimetype = 'mime/type';     header('Content-Type: '.$mimetype );     readfile_chunked($filename);  } else {     echo 'Tabatha says you haven\'t paid.'; } ?>