I have a PHP Laravel (5.6) system that I need to connect to an FTP server to upload a single file. The FTP server that I am connecting to is restricting access by ip address, uses port 990, and other than that has a seemingly simple configuration. On my local machine (I'm running on Linux Ubuntu if that helps) I am able to connect to the ftp server in FileZilla just fine, FileZilla did seem to automatically choose ftps. I am also able to ping this server.

Now this PHP Laravel (5.6) application is running on NGINX (had this for a while, everything else server-wise seems fine). As of now I am just trying to get this working locally, though there is a production server that it will have to be pushed onto (pretty much identical configuration though).

I started out trying to use the built in PHP function ftp_connect and ftp_ssl_connect - both using the same host and port number (990) as in FileZilla. I have been unable to get past this step - it returns false (so never even gets to my login logic).

$ftp = ftp_connect(env('FTP_HOST'),env('FTP_PORT')); // returns FALSE
$ftp = ftp_ssl_connect(env('FTP_HOST'),env('FTP_PORT')): // returns FALSE

After searching for a while I decided to try Laravel's filesystem to see if that would make it easier, these are my settings in config/filesystems.php:

'ftp' => [
            'driver' => 'ftp',
            'host' => env('FTP_HOST'),
            'username' => env('FTP_USER'),
            'password' => env('FTP_PASSWORD'),
            'port' => env('FTP_PORT'),
            'ssl' => true,
            'timeout' => 60,
        ],

'sftp' => [
            'driver' => 'sftp',
            'host' => env('FTP_HOST'),
            'username' => env('FTP_USER'),
            'password' => env('FTP_PASSWORD'),
            'port' => env('FTP_PORT'),
            'timeout' => 60,
        ],

I figured I'd try both ftp and sftp here, I then tried the following:

Storage::disk('ftp')->put('test.csv', $file);

and

Storage::disk('sftp')->put('test.csv', $file);

The first just timed out, the second gave me the message: League\Flysystem\Sftp\ConnectionErrorException: Could not login with username: ###, host: ### in...

Any ideas of what this could be or next steps I could take towards troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated, I feel like I just don't know what to try to get a better understanding of what's wrong here. Thanks!

EDIT: I realized that previously I had always used the quick connect feature in FileZilla for this. I looked into it further and was able to confirm that the encryption has to be implicit FTP over TLS - So I'm wondering if there is a setting for that I'm missing.