How to enable and use HTTP PUT and DELETE with Apache2 and PHP?

Question

Hi,

It should be so simple. I've followed every tutorial and forum I could find, yet I can't get it to work. I simply want to build a RESTful API in PHP on Apache2.

In my VirtualHost directive I say:

<Directory />
    AllowOverride All
    <Limit GET HEAD POST PUT DELETE OPTIONS>
        Order Allow,Deny
        Allow from all
    </Limit>
</Directory>

Yet every PUT request I make to the server, I get 405 method not supported.

Someone advocated using the Script directive, but since I use mod_php, as opposed to CGI, I don't see why that would work.

People mention using WebDAV, but to me that seems like overkill. After all, I don't need DAV locking, a DAV filesystem, etc. All I want to do is pass the request on to a PHP script and handle everything myself. I only want to enable PUT and DELETE for the clean semantics.

Thanks,

Andreas

Answer 1

You don't need to configure anything. Just make sure that the requests map to your PHP file and use requests with path info. For example, if you have in the root a file named handler.php with this content:

<?php

var_dump($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']);
var_dump($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
var_dump($_SERVER['PATH_INFO']);

if (($stream = fopen('php://input', "r")) !== FALSE)
    var_dump(stream_get_contents($stream));

The following HTTP request would work:

Established connection with 127.0.0.1 on port 81
PUT /handler.php/bla/foo HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:81
Content-length: 5
 
boo
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 29 May 2010 16:00:20 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.13 (Win32) PHP/5.3.0
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.0
Content-Length: 89
Content-Type: text/html
 
string(3) "PUT"
string(20) "/handler.php/bla/foo"
string(8) "/bla/foo"
string(5) "boo
"
Connection closed remotely.

You can hide the "php" extension with MultiViews or you can make URLs completely logical with mod_rewrite.

See also the documentation for the AcceptPathInfo directive and this question on how to make PHP not parse POST data when enctype is multipart/form-data.

Answer 2

The technical limitations with using PUT and DELETE requests does not lie with PHP or Apache2; it is instead on the burden of the browser to sent those types of requests.

Simply putting <form action="" method="PUT"> will not work because there are no browsers that support that method (and they would simply default to GET, treating PUT the same as it would treat gibberish like FDSFGS). Sadly those HTTP verbs are limited to the realm of non-desktop application browsers (ie: web service consumers).