Handle HTTP POST with PHP

Question

Hello all, I struggled half a day and came to conclusion that it can't be done. I threw away my php scripts and rewrote it in perl and it worked right from the start the way I wanted it to work. Still, I want to find out if such trivial task can be done correctly in PHP. The question: I have arbitrarily long (in size and time) file upload (via raw data POST) and I simply need to save it to a file with PHP. The way it works with PHP is that it fist fully processes the posted data, saves it to a file and then execution of my script begins (my file upload lasts 30 minutes). Even if I tried to fopen("php:/stdin" or php://input) it still worked that retarded way. What I really need is to be able to process incoming posted data in chunks sequentially. I tried: 1) modphp, 2) php-cgi, 3) php-cli run as a cgi executable. Even though php-cgi is meant to be used a cgi, it still preprocesses posted data (so that $_POST becomes available) and doesn't work just the same way as regular momphp. CLI version run as a cgi script doens't work, as it can't read from php://stdin or php://input at all! Whatever I tried, nothing worked for me and I came to conclusion that it can't be done with PHP... or it can?

thanks

Answer 1

Of course PHP can do it. Uploaded files are stored in a temporary directory until the PHP script can interact with them. The information necessary to do so is in the $_FILES array.

$field_name = 'file'; # from the HTML form control

$move_result = move_uploaded_file(
    $_FILES[$field_name]['tmp_name'],
    $real_destfile
);

if ($move_result) {
    print "successfully uploaded file (originally called '$_FILES[$field_name]['name']' to $real_destfile";
} else {
    print "failed to receive uploaded file.";
}

Answer 2

it sounds like you want to stream data. to do that you would have to set up a socket that is ready to recive data as a stream.. ie replace the apache web server.

Your problem is not the language, it is the web server. the web server listens to port 80, and then does what it does. Eg write the post data to file then start the php script.

you can create a custom port program like you did with Pearl. you could also do the same thing with PHP, and listen to port 80, using a command line driven php script, rather than one that is nestled inside apache. But PHP is not the best language to do that with.. I would suggest Python.

There is an overhead attached to HTTP communications, prehaps a leaner protocol would be of use to you, it may reduce your upload time.

if your upload is taking so long, you could do it in an AJAX method, and let it continue whilst your client application is still active. the client AJAX application could also do the work of dividing it into chunks.