Remotely Download Google AJAX Libraries Using PHP

By  on  

I don't know how to use all of the JavaScript libraries but perusing their code is interesting. If I'm looking to code something I'll look at how each of the other libraries accomplishes the task. The problem is that you need to go out and download each one. And of course they're all on different development schedules so you'd also need to make sure to grab the latest version of the library. Instead of manually accomplishing that task, I've chosen create a script that does all of that for me.

The PHP

//settings
$dir = 'js-libs/';
$url = 'http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/index.html';

//open file
$content = get_content($url);
echo 'Retrieved page from Google.';

//parse
$regex = '/http:\/\/ajax.googleapis.com\/ajax\/libs\/.*.js/isU';

//match?
preg_match_all($regex,$content,$matches);

//make sure there are no repeated files
$js_files = array_unique($matches[0]);

//download every file and save locally
foreach($js_files as $file) {
	//download
	$content = get_content($file);
	//save
	$filename = str_replace(array('http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/','/'),array('','-'),$file);
	file_put_contents($dir.$filename,$content);
	//
	echo 'saving ',$file;
}

//function to grab content from a url
function get_content($url) {
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_USERAGENT,'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13');
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
	curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,5);
	$content = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	return $content;
}

Pow! One quick script to get you all of the popular JavaScript libraries in 10 seconds. You may not know how to use each library but it sure doesn't hurt to have them around.

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    AJAX For Evil:  Spyjax with jQuery

    Last year I wrote a popular post titled AJAX For Evil: Spyjax when I described a technique called "Spyjax": Spyjax, as I know it, is taking information from the user's computer for your own use — specifically their browsing habits. By using CSS and JavaScript, I...

  • By
    MooTools Text Flipping

    There are lots and lots of useless but fun JavaScript techniques out there. This is another one of them. One popular April Fools joke I quickly got tired of was websites transforming their text upside down. I found a jQuery Plugin by Paul...

Discussion

  1. I should note that I run this from the command line.

  2. Mohamed Jama

    Nice script David! did you redesign your site?! keep up the good work mate :)

  3. Nice reminder to think things through and do the extra mile to save time in the future.

    The url has changed in the last four years: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide. Seems people at google don’t know how to put a permanent redirect into place…

    Regards,

    pepebe

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!