Request via FTP and return file via HTTP

Question

I am developing a blog and would like to use resources from another server via FTP. In order to share some of these files in my posts I imagined that it would be possible to connect the FTP within PHP and return the desired file to the user, without having to copy to my PHP server from the blog. Hence the questions: would PHP need to download the whole file before returning it? Which method should I use from the library nicolab/php-ftp-client to achieve such an effect?

An example more or less than I think it would be:

Route::get('files/{id_artigo}/{arquivo}', 'FTPController@pegarArquivo');

And within the method, that would be the interesting part, but I don’t know how to proceed:

$ftp = FTPClient();
$ftp->connect($host);
$ftp->login($user, $passwd);
// Abaixo o dummyMethod() deveria
// pegar o arquivo e armazenar em $file
// NOTA: $nome é o nome do arquivo 
$file = $ftp->dummyMethod($nome);
return $file;

Answer 1

One way would be to redirect directly to the file:

header('Location: ftp://username:[email protected]/somefile.zip');

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7029340/redirecting-to-ftp-url-with-username-and-password-in-safari

It would not be easier for you on this other server to make the files available via HTTP and just pass the link?