How to download a file using Curl in PHP – Code Snippet

Download a File using Curl

Here is a quick curl snippet for php, that can download a remote file and save it.

<?php

set_time_limit(0);

// File to save the contents to
$fp = fopen ('files2.tar', 'w+');

$url = "http://localhost/files.tar";

// Here is the file we are downloading, replace spaces with %20
$ch = curl_init(str_replace(" ","%20",$url));

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 50);

// give curl the file pointer so that it can write to it
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);

$data = curl_exec($ch);//get curl response

//done
curl_close($ch);

The CURLOPT_FILE option takes a file resources and writes the content of the url to that file resource/handle. Also set the script time limit to something large so that the script does not end when downloading large files.