Connection to secure FTP Server from PHP

Question

This question is in line with this question, I am trying to connect to secure FTP Server and it is not able to connect, wierd part is that I am able to do ssh and connect to the server but when I try to do it from php code using few different approaches but it is not working

Approaches:

1. FTP Wrappers
2. ftp_connect & ftp_login
3. ftp_ssl_connect
4. ssh2_sftp
5. ssh2-scp-send & ssh2-scp-receive -- Have not tried this approach yet but recommended in comments portion and so would work on this and will post updates later.

Code for Approach 1:

$ftp_server = "ftp://username:[email protected]:21/{$log_file_name}";
$opts = array('ftp' => array('overwrite' => TRUE));
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$put_file = file_put_contents($ftp_server, $response, LOCK_EX,$context);

Here also am not able to connect to secure FTP Server, any suggestions as to why it is not able to connect ?

Code for Approach 2:

ftp_server = 'www.server.com';
$conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server) or die ("Cannot connect to host");
//Program dies out here and give error message "Cannot connect to host",
//but why ftp_login does not work here, Any Suggestions ?
$ftp_user_name = "login";
$ftp_user_pass = "password";
// login with username and password
$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);
// check connection and login result
if ((!$conn_id) || (!$login_result)) 
{ echo "FTP connection has encountered an error!";
  echo "Attempted to connect to $ftp_server for user $ftp_user_name....";
 //exit;
} else 
{ 
 echo "Connected to $ftp_server, for user $ftp_user_name".".....";
}

Code for Approach 3:

Here am using same code as approach 1 but instead of ftp_connect, am using ftp_ssl_connect

Code for Approach 4:

$connection = ssh2_connect('www.server.com', 22);
ssh2_auth_password($connection, 'login', 'password');
$sftp = ssh2_sftp($connection);
//exit();
$stream = fopen("ssh2.sftp://$sftp/path/to/file", 'r');

Can anyone advise why am I not able to connect to secure FTP Server using above approaches but still am able to do so using ssh ?

Are there any other approaches to connect to secure FTP Server using php ?

UPDATE:

Q1. I tried again using ftp_connect but it just died out and why does it dies out, what are the scenarios in which ftp_connect dies out ?

Q2. Do we have only this approaches to connect to the server or are there any other which we can implement ?

Q3. Is this php language related that it does not support secure FTP Connection ? OR there is any other way of doing this using php, if yes than do provide different approaches as it would be very helpful.

UPDATE 1:

I was trying to google more on the issue and it seems that if ftp_connect does not work than firewall could be one of the reason for it. I am not totally sure if that is the case but I am researching more on it and post an update in here if I find anything useful.

Possible Solution :

Problem

If I remove the "or die" then you get the error:

When running from a webpage:

Warning: ftp_login() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /var/www/ftp_test.php on line 28

var_dump($conn_id); returns bool(false).

From command line /usr/bin/php /var/www/ftp_test.php

var_dump($conn_id); returns resource(4) of type (FTP Buffer).

Script completes.

Solution 1

This could be one solution :

Try to turn off selinux and here is the way or Search : How to disable selinux for turning it off temporarily or permanently.

Solution 2

If you don't want to turn off selinux completely, you might get what you need by just setting the httpd_can_network_connect using the setsebool command.

Verify that it was previously set to "off": getsebool httpd_can_network_connect

Set it to "on":

setsebool httpd_can_network_connect=1

Turn selinux back on: setenforce 1

Check to be sure php ftp_connect still works when running under httpd.

Set the policy (-P) to "on" so it persists over a reboot:

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect=1

Solution 3

There could also be issue with company firewall. Make sure it is configured properly and has access rights set properly.

Solution 4

Another approach is to use cURL : libcurl as it can be used to connect and communicate to many different types of servers with many different types of protocols

Solution 5

There is open source project called PHP Secure Communication Library (phpspeclib) which can be also used to establish secure connection to FTP Server.

Answer 1

This page has what you seek (I think)

http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/article/make_ssh_connections_with_php/

and here are the manual pages

http://php.net/manual/en/book.ssh2.php