Download file to my hard drive at regular interval

[maraki2]

Hey guys, nice forum here - hope you can help me Here is the situation

1. I need to login to an https website using username and password

2. I need to download a zip file which is stored in this https location to my computer's hard drive C:

 

3. I need to do this automatically once every day

 

any help would be much appreciated as i don't know where to start - I read that the best solution would be to use PHP Curl but need help with the syntax.

cheers

Maraki

[lemmin]

cURL is definitely the best solution for sending packets over SSL. Here is a place to start:

$post = 'username=yourname&password=yourpass';
$curl = curl_init('https://www.securesite.com/login');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post);
$response = curl_exec($curl);

There is a good chance that the end server will be looking for some extra information, possibly in the form of headers. To find out what this information is, use a packet sniffer (like firebug) to find out exactly what information is being sent by the browser.

 

https://getfirebug.com/

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php

[maraki2]

thanks for the info... i am really a newbie when it comes to cURL.. I found this piece of code but i need to make it so that the file is downloaded to my hard drive...

function get_stats($login_url, $username, $password, $login_button, $csv_title, $download_url){
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $login_url);
    $post_fields = 'username='.urlencode($username).'&password='.urlencode($password);
    // Some sites don't send this variable, hence the check
    if(trim(urlencode($login_button)) != ''){
        $post_fields .= '&'.$login_button.'='.$login_button;
    }
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_fields);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, dirname(__FILE__) . '/cookies.txt');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, dirname(__FILE__) . '/cookies.txt');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3");
    curl_exec($ch);

    // Prevent the script from timing out
    set_time_limit(0);

    $fp = fopen (dirname(__FILE__) . '/'.$csv_title, 'w+');//This is the file where we save the information
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $download_url);//Here is the file we are downloading
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 50);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    fclose($fp);
}

[lemmin]

If you have the connection working, all you have to do is save the response in a local file:

$response = curl_exec($ch);
file_put_contents(dirname(__FILE__) . '/'.$csv_title, $response);

[maraki2]

thanks lemmin, one last question what would be the syntax to fire this function using php... sorry for being such a newb - getting there..