Including a Remote File in PHP

including a remote file in PHP

To allow inclusion of remote files, the directive allow_url_include must be set to On in php.ini

But it is bad, in a security-oriented point of view ; and, so, it is generally disabled (I've never seen it enabled, actually)

It is not the same as allow_url_fopen, which deals with opening (and not including) remote files -- and this one is generally enabled, because it makes fetching of data through HTTP much easier (easier than using curl)

Read a remote file in php

Option 1 - Curl

Use CURL and set the CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION-option to true:

<?php

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http//example.com");
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

    if(curl_exec($ch) === FALSE) {
         echo "Error: " . curl_error($ch);
    } else {
         echo curl_exec($ch);
    }

    curl_close($ch);

?>

Option 2 - file_get_contents

According to the PHP Documentation file_get_contents() will follow up to 20 redirects as default. Therefore you could use that function. On failure, file_get_contents() will return FALSE and otherwise it will return the entire file.

<?php

    $string = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com");

    if($string === FALSE) {
         echo "Could not read the file.";
    } else {
         echo $string;
    }

?>

Including remote HTML file

Try cURL:

http://php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php

Basic example:

$ch = curl_init("http://www.example.com/");
$fp = fopen("example_homepage.txt", "w");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

Ref: http://php.net/manual/en/curl.examples-basic.php

Return value from include on a remote file

Try using file_get_contents() instead of include.

This writes the file into a variable [causing the script to execute remotely], but won't run the response locally.

Alternatively If you have the ability to use cURL, it is safer and probably quicker.

A small snippet to remotely file_get_contents();

function curl_get_contents($url){
    $c = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $res = curl_exec($c);
    if (curl_getinfo($c, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE) > 400) $res = false;
    curl_close($c);
    return $res;
    }

By way of explanation

• RETURNTRANSFER puts the response of the curl request into a variable (instead of printing to screen).
• CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION has not been set, so if the page has been moved, curl will not follow it. You can set that, or have it set based on a second argument.
• HTTP_CODE, if above 400 (an err code, presumably 404 or 500) will return false instead of the fancy custom 404 page that might be setup.
  
  In my testing, get_headers() is more reliable than curlinfo_http_code but requires a second call to the page being included, which can make things go awry.
  
  eg. if (!strpos(200, get_headers($url)[0])) return false;

Including remote files in PHP

If you mean that the function 'makeConnection()' is declared in the external file.php then you won't see the function because the external server is parsing the php code NOT sending you the raw code.

You'll need to save the external file.php to something like file.txt so that the server returns the contents without processing.

Try it and see if it works for you.

If it does then you can plan something more efficient.

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