PHP: How to access download folder outside root directory? [duplicate]

Answer 1

I believe what you're trying to accomplish (stream an existing zip file via php) can be done similar to the answer here: LAMP: How to create .Zip of large files for the user on the fly, without disk/CPU thrashing

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Slightly modified version of code from this answer:

// make sure to send all headers first
// Content-Type is the most important one (probably)
//
header('Content-Type: application/x-gzip');

$filename = "/path/to/zip.zip";
$fp = fopen($filename, "rb");

// pick a bufsize that makes you happy
$bufsize = 8192;
$buff = '';
while( !feof($fp) ) {
   $buff = fread($fp, $bufsize);
   echo $buff;
}
pclose($fp);

Answer 2

You might find some better info in the link provided by @soac, but here is an excerpt from some of my code for PDF files only:

<?php
      $file = ( !empty($_POST['file']) ? basename(trim($_POST['file'])) : '' );
      $full_path = '/dir1/dir2/dir3/'.$file;  // absolute physical path to file below web root.
      if ( file_exists($full_path) )
      {
         $mimetype = 'application/pdf';

         header('Cache-Control: no-cache');
         header('Cache-Control: no-store');
         header('Pragma: no-cache');
         header('Content-Type: ' . $mimetype);
         header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($full_path));

         $fh = fopen($full_path,"rb");
         while (!feof($fh)) { print(fread($fh, filesize($full_path))); }
         fclose($fh);
      }
      else
      {
         header("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found");
         exit;
      }
?>

Note that this opens the PDF in the browser rather than downloading it perse, although you can save the file locally from within the reader. Using readfile() would probably be more efficient (and cleaner code) than the old way of opening the file via a handle the way I do in this example.

readfile($full_path);