Download files from server php

To read directory contents you can use readdir() and use a script, in my example download.php, to download files

if ($handle = opendir('/path/to/your/dir/')) {
    while (false !== ($entry = readdir($handle))) {
        if ($entry != "." && $entry != "..") {
            echo "<a href='download.php?file=".$entry."'>".$entry."</a>\n";
        }
    }
    closedir($handle);
}

In download.php you can force browser to send download data, and use basename() to make sure client does not pass other file name like ../config.php

$file = basename($_GET['file']);
$file = '/path/to/your/dir/'.$file;

if(!file_exists($file)){ // file does not exist
    die('file not found');
} else {
    header("Cache-Control: public");
    header("Content-Description: File Transfer");
    header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$file");
    header("Content-Type: application/zip");
    header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");

    // read the file from disk
    readfile($file);
}

Here is the code that will not download courpt files

$filename = "myfile.jpg";
$file = "/uploads/images/".$filename;

header('Content-type: application/octet-stream');
header("Content-Type: ".mime_content_type($file));
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$filename);
while (ob_get_level()) {
    ob_end_clean();
}
readfile($file);

I have included mime_content_type which will return content type of file .

To prevent from corrupt file download i have added ob_get_level() and ob_end_clean();

If the folder is accessible from the browser (not outside the document root of your web server), then you just need to output links to the locations of those files. If they are outside the document root, you will need to have links, buttons, whatever, that point to a PHP script that handles getting the files from their location and streaming to the response.