Are there alternative methods to curl for downloading files in PHP?

When curl is not available or enabled on a server, you can use alternative methods to download files in PHP. One common alternative method is using file_get_contents() function along with stream context to download files from a URL. 

$url = 'https://example.com/file.zip';
$destination = 'downloaded_file.zip';

$context = stream_context_create(array(
    'http' => array('header' => 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/54.0')
));

$file = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);

file_put_contents($destination, $file);

Keywords

curl alternative methods downloading files PHP libraries

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