Ashley Sheridan​.co.uk

Using PHP to make a HEAD request to get a files size

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I had a request recently to get the size of a large collection of files that were hosted on Amazons S3 storage and add the values to a database containing a list of these files that acted as a local cache. I saw two main ways to achieve this: mount the S3 storage and treat the files as if they were local, or query the files on the fly as the sizes are required.

I went for the second method, which was actually a lot easier, mostly due to the fact that the server this script was intended to run on didn't allow me the level of access I'd need to mount a remote file system.

The script itself is fairly simple; use cURL to make a HEAD request, echo the returned Content-Length value, and that's it!

$remoteFile = 'http://ashleysheridan.co.uk/img/articles/canvas_glow.png'; $ch = curl_init($remoteFile); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); $data = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); $contentLength = 0; if($data !== false) { if (preg_match('/Content-Length: (\d+)/', $data, $matches)) { $contentLength = (int)$matches[1]; } } echo $contentLength;

Lines 3 through 6 set up the options for cURL, the last of which is only necessary if you are making a request from a site which uses redirects, like mine does to always force the www part on the url. The preg_match line just pulls out the information from the header result that we want. If for some reason the file size wasn't available, then the script will just output a 0.

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