Using FTP inside PHP – Part 1

This tutorial will show you some PHP functions that can be used to work with FTP and doing different things :

1. connect to FTP.
2. list content (files and directories from FTP server)
3. upload files to FTP.

I divided this tutorial into two parts to be easier to read and understand.

Using FTP inside of PHP is very useful for example if you make a PHP script that makes backups, you will need to store that backup on an external server. You can add the PHP script in cron and you are done. Let’s start :

1. For connecting to FTP you need three things: the host, the user and the password. First of all, you need to make the connection to the FTP server using ftp_connect(). This receives as an argument only the host or IP. After that using ftp_login() function you can login to the FTP. This function receives conn_id which is the id of the connexion returned by ftp_connect(); also the user and the password must be given. For closing the connection you can use ftp_close() which receives conn_id as parameter.

<?php // data for ftp connection $ftp_server = 'ftp.mywebsite.net'; $ftp_user = 'user'; $ftp_pass = 'passwd'; $conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server); $login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user, $ftp_pass); if ((!$conn_id) || (!$login_result)) { echo "Connection to $ftp_server failed for $ftp_user."; exit; } else { echo "Connection to $ftp_server is succesful for $ftp_user"; } ftp_close($conn_id); ?>

It’s easy to understand the code above so I will not explain it.

2. To list the files and directories from another directory you can use ftp_nlist(conn_id, dir).

<?php // data for ftp connection $ftp_server = 'ftp.mywebsite.net'; $ftp_user = 'user'; $ftp_pass = 'passwd'; $conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server); $login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user, $ftp_pass); if ((!$conn_id) || (!$login_result)) { echo "Connection failed."; exit; } else { //we obtained the content of directory "."; you can put for example /public_html instead of . $result = ftp_nlist($conn_id, "."); for ($i=0; $i<count($resultt); $i++) { echo '<br />‘.$result[$i];<br /> }<br /> }

As you can see from the example above, the result is an array which can be displayed easily in a FOR loop.

3. Uploading files – ftp_put(conn_id, destination, file, transfer_type) – this will return TRUE if file was uploaded succesfully or FALSE otherwise.

• conn_id – is the connection id.
• destination – the directory where the file will be uploaded.
• file – the name of the file.
• transfer_type – can be FTP_ASCII or FTP_BINARY.

<?php // data for ftp connection $ftp_server = 'ftp.mywebsite.net'; $ftp_user = 'user'; $ftp_pass = 'passwd'; $conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server); $login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user, $ftp_pass); if ((!$conn_id) || (!$login_result)) { echo "Connection failed"; exit; } else { $file = 'test.txt'; $source = '/home/andreic/mywebsite/'. $file; $destination = '/home/andreic/new_dir/public_html/'. $file; if (ftp_put($conn_id, $destination, $source, FTP_BINARY)) echo "The file $file was uploaded on the server"; else echo "Error, the file could not be uploaded on the server"; } //close the connection ftp_close($conn_id); ?>

That’s it for now! You can see the rest in Using FTP inside PHP – Part 2.