Using wget with windows command prompt to download the files outside the site directory

Question

I have to download files which are outside the my site directory using wget with windows let me make it more clear.

I have my site running on Linux server.

Domain  ---> www.example.com

/var/www/html ---> This is the my site directory

/home/username/data.csv  ---> This is the file I wants to download

When I try to download any file from the site directory it is working fine but it is not getting downloaded from here /home/username/data.csv

c:\wget\ wget.exe --ftp-user="username" --ftp-password="password" "www.example.com/index.php"

The above command works good and 'index.php' file is downloaded successfully.

But how to target /home/username/data.csv file and download using wget?

I tried with this but I was sure this will not work.

c:\wget\ wget.exe --ftp-user="username" --ftp-password="password" "www.example.com/home/username/data.csv"

I can understand why this command does not work and return 404 error, because the domain is pointing to the /var/www/html directory hence wget internally reads it like /var/www/html/home/username/data.csv and this is true there is no such file.

So my question is Does wget accept the path?

How do I do download the file outside my site directory?

Answer 1

How do I do download the file outside my site directory?

You can't ask the web server to provide it, for security reasons.

Try using ftp instead

wget ftp://username:password@www.example.com/data.csv

If FTP service isn't available, configure it or use sftp instead, for greater security.

Answer 2

Your web server is only serving files from the /var/www/html/ path and it doesn't know about the existence of /home/username/. You need to launch some kind of a web server instance inside /home/username/ before you can wget files from that directory.

Here are a couple of ways to make that work.

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• Start a temporary HTTP server instance using Python in your home directory.

$ cd /home/username

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer (python -m http.server on Python 3.x)

$ wget http://example.com:8000/data.csv

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• Create a symlink to /home/username/ from /var/www/html/, though this is not recommended as it exposes your entire home directory. Or create the symlink to data.csv itself.

$ cd /var/www/html/

$ ln -s /home/username/data.csv data.csv (ln -s /home/username homedir to symlink the directory)

$ wget http://www.example.com/data.csv

Make sure, that you have enabled using symlinks (globally or for this Directory only) Options FollowSymLinks See here for more documentation regarding symbolic links.

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