Does file_get_contents() have a timeout setting?

Question

I am calling a series of links using the file_get_contents() method in a loop. Each link may take more than 15 minutes to process. Now, I worry about whether PHP's file_get_contents() has a timeout period?

If yes, it will time out with a call and move to next link. I don't want to call the next link without the prior one finishing.

So, please tell me whether file_get_contents() has a timeout period. The file which contains the file_get_contents() is set to set_time_limit() to zero (unlimited).

Answer 1

The default timeout is defined by default_socket_timeout ini-setting, which is 60 seconds. You can also change it on the fly:

ini_set('default_socket_timeout', 900); // 900 Seconds = 15 Minutes

Another way to set a timeout, would be to use stream_context_create to set the timeout as HTTP context options of the HTTP stream wrapper in use:

$ctx = stream_context_create(array('http'=>
    array(
        'timeout' => 1200,  //1200 Seconds is 20 Minutes
    )
));

echo file_get_contents('http://example.com/', false, $ctx);

Answer 2

As @diyism mentioned, "default_socket_timeout, stream_set_timeout, and stream_context_create timeout are all the timeout of every line read/write, not the whole connection timeout." And the top answer by @stewe has failed me.

As an alternative to using file_get_contents, you can always use curl with a timeout.

So here's a working code that works for calling links.

$url='http://example.com/';
$ch=curl_init();
$timeout=5;

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);

$result=curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $result;

Answer 3

Yes! By passing a stream context in the third parameter:

Here with a timeout of 1s:

file_get_contents("https://abcedef.com", 0, stream_context_create(["http"=>["timeout"=>1]]));

Source in comment section of https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php

HTTP context options:

method
header
user_agent
content
request_fulluri
follow_location
max_redirects
protocol_version
timeout

Non HTTP stream contexts

Socket
FTP
SSL
CURL
Phar
Context (notifications callback)
Zip

Answer 4

It is worth noting that if changing default_socket_timeout on the fly, it might be useful to restore its value after your file_get_contents call:

$default_socket_timeout = ini_get('default_socket_timeout');
....
ini_set('default_socket_timeout', 10);
file_get_contents($url);
...
ini_set('default_socket_timeout', $default_socket_timeout);

Answer 5

For me work when i change my php.ini in my host:

; Default timeout for socket based streams (seconds)
default_socket_timeout = 300

Answer 6

For prototyping, using curl from the shell with the -m parameter allow to pass milliseconds, and will work in both cases, either the connection didn't initiate, error 404, 500, bad url, or the whole data wasn't retrieved in full in the allowed time range, the timeout is always effective. Php won't ever hang out.

Simply don't pass unsanitized user data in the shell call.

system("curl -m 50 -X GET 'https://api.kraken.com/0/public/OHLC?pair=LTCUSDT&interval=60' -H  'accept: application/json' > data.json");
// This data had been refreshed in less than 50ms
var_dump(json_decode(file_get_contents("data.json"),true));