Download a .php file using Storage::download()

@martinbean I thought the Storage facade might allow me to download a .php as opposed to rendering it. Do you know what class handles the filtering of the request?

I've also updated my post with more context.

@kokoshneta It is a bad idea, I completely agree. I've updated my post with more context.

@zorkwarrior Wow, so it’s really an XML file with a PHP file extension, which the app downloads? That sounds… dreadful.

Are you sure the app actually downloads the file, though? That implies a browser which reads the contents of the file and saves it into a file on the user’s (or in this case app’s) machine. It would make more sense for the app to read the contents of the file as an HTTP stream, rather than actually downloading it as a file.

In either case, it shouldn’t be difficult to do. You’ll have to set the appropriate headers, then use something like file_get_contents() to output the contents in the appropriate way, then close the connection.

Not sure if this is really a Laravel issue:

I noticed that I could download the file on my dev machine (upon running php artisan serve), but not in production (via nginx). So I guess somewhere along the way, there is some very functional difference between the way that php-cli runs the php builtin server vs how php-fpm serves files.

Unfortunately I'm not too fluent with the ways of nginx

@zorkwarrior If you use something like file_get_contents and set the correct headers, the way the server or php-fpm/php-cli handles and serves PHP files doesn’t matter, because you’re not involving them at all. You’re simply reading the contents of a plain text file, as plain text, and then outputting those same contents as a text string and streaming them into a file on the user’s machine.

@kokoshneta Yeah the app does download the file. It uses the C# WebClient::DownloadData() method to do so. Because 'legacy', I can read but not update this source. Actually it uses this .xml/.php file to know what other files it needs to download.

The problem I'm running into, is that even though I can serve the information from that file, I seem to be getting a 404 from it. I've set the headers (via stream_context_create()) to match what I would get before (with open directory listings), but that doesn't seem to work. For that matter, my content type isn't getting set properly either so I'm definitely doing something wrong.

// DownloadsController.php
public function downloadFile()
{
        if(!file_exists($filePath))
            return null;

        // Create a stream
        $headers = "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n" .
            "Vary: Accept-Encoding\r\n" .
            "Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100\r\n" .
            "Connection: Keep-Alive\r\n" .
            "Content-Length: " . filesize($filePath) . "\r\n" .
            "Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8\r\n";
            "Date: " . date('now') . "\r\n".
            "Server: "  . $_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'] . "\r\n";

        $opts = [
            'http' => [
                'method' => "GET",
                'header' => $headers,
            ]
        ];

        $context = stream_context_create($opts);

        return file_get_contents($filePath, false, $context);
//        $fileContents = file_get_contents($filePath, false, $context);
//       $escapedContents = htmlentities($fileContents);

//        return $escapedContents;
}

EDIT: Actually I don't get anything but a 'File not found.' in my browser unless I set a header in nginx. The one that gives me something is:

server {
		...
        location = /downloads/file.php {
                add_header Content-Type text/xml;
                add_header Content-disposition "attachment; filename=$1";
        }
}