How to communicate FTP transfer with standalone PHP Server?

Question

I have a Ubuntu Server on which I have my Apache and FTP server (I am using Proftpd server). I have a small PHP CMS and for database I am using MySQL server. This was my server side environment. Now on client side I have a C# ftp client which I use to download the file from FTP server. Also, this C# client communicates with my PHP CMS.

So in short there are two communications occurs at a time

1. C# client and FTP server for file transfer.
2. C# client and PHP CMS for some other work.

So, now what I want is real time progress (progress bar) of my ftp transfer on one of my CMS webpage.

Obviously one of thing I can do is that I can tell my C# client to upload it's download progress to PHP server using some web service or web socket and then I can show the progress of ftp transfer(basically progress of downloading of C# client).

But before doing this I just want to know that is it possible for my PHP server to check what FTP server is doing. Since, no communication occurs between them I don't know how to accomplish it? I have a MySQL server and I know that proftp can communicate with MySQL server and it has some predefined table in which I can store whatever is ftp server doing. But will it possible to use it to show a real time progress? Is their any other technique to do this or will I have to force my C# client to do it?

Answer 1

From what you say, you have no need to talk to the FTP server at all (except to download the file, of course). Your FTP client could upload the FTP transfer status to a Web socket (and why could it not display it directly?), there to be recovered by the CMS and shown in the page. By using sessions, you do not even need to actively save that information anywhere, provided the Web socket call properly initializes the session cookies.

In the FTP client download callback function just add a call to send the progress status to the server. There, a scriptlet will save it into, say, $_SESSION['download_status']. An AJAX call on the CMS page can then retrieve it and display it periodically.

Don't forget to also upload FTP session and exception status (transfer interrupted, etc.).