PHP read file from network drive

I’m working on a local hosted project where php needs to read a text file that’s stored on a network drive and is not directly accessible with a php script or so I thought.

Turns out with the correct network path a regular file_get_contents is all you need to grab files located over a network drive. In the example below I’m calling a txt file located on a z drive.

file_get_contents('file:///z:/Desktop/contacts.txt')

 For this to work the php server needs to be running on the same network you’re trying to access.