here is my situation:
I want to create an AJAX file-upload script, which will upload to an external site (ie: not the one the script is located in) and at the same time report the progress of the upload. How would I go about doing this? Note that the process must be secure.
If you are POSTing the file to another server there is no way to know the status of this upload since the upload is done between the users browser and the remote site.
If you have access to the script that handles file upload on the other site you could use Zend_File_Transfer and Zend_ProgressBar to fetch the information on the uplad progress from the other site and display it on your page.
Note: to use Zend_ProgressBar you need APC or uploadprogress extension.
There are two ways to do:
Using ajax and CGI
Using flash
The advantage of the flash method is that it does not require you to rewrite any server side scripts. This is especially good if you upload to a different server than yours. You do need to put a cross domain xml file on that server though.
The advantage of the ajax version is that it does not require your users to have flash installed.
There is no way to get the exact progress using ajax and php. Using php and ajax you can only know wheather the upload is in progress or finished. That is the reason why all ajax/php aplications have loading but no progress bar. If you explicitly want progress bar you should use a PERL CGI
Flash ( swfupload ) is probably the easiest. Vimeo.com uses swfupload to achieve this as well. Ihe only other method I know of involves php and APC which a tutorial of can be found at http://phpriot.com/articles/php-ajax-file-uploads.
Related
As all of us know, PHP finishes the upload and the enables you to use move_uploaded_file(); before this, however, it creates a temp file and then does the job. I want to know is it possible to get the name of this uploaded file during the file upload and before populating it into $_FILES?
I want to get the upload progress, while $_SESSION and Javascript onprogress solution both suck..
$_FILES['file']['tmp_name']; is the filename. It is not possible in PHP (without using ugly tricks) to get the filename before the upload is finished.
To do this, you have to fallback on either Flash (uploadify) or CGI (Perl / Python / C++ / Other)
A "reliable" progress bar, which seems to be your goal, will always require some sort of server and client support. In its most general and portable instance, PHP will see only the completed upload and you'll get no progress bar, but only the filled $_FILES structure.
On some platforms the information can be garnered from the system itself. For example under Linux/Apache you can inspect what temporary files Apache has opened in the /proc pseudo-filesystem, where available; so you need to put in the requisites "Linux, Apache, php5_module, /proc".
You can use a dedicated POST endpoint that does not terminate on the Web server, but on a specially crafted uploader process (I worked on a Perl script doing this years ago; I recall it used POE, and the architecture):
POST (from browser) ==> (server, proxying) ==> UPLOADER
The uploader immediately echoes a crafted GET to the server, activating
a PHP "pre-upload" page, and then might call a progress GET URL periodically
to update the upload status. When completed, it would issue a pseudo POST
to PHP "almost" as if it came from the client, sending $_POST['_FILES']
instead of $_FILES.
The $_SESSION solution is a good compromise but relies on the server not doing buffering.
A better and more "modern" solution would be to leverage the chunked upload AJAX trick and get resumable uploads, reliable progress and large file support all in one nifty package. See for example this other answer. Now you get wider server support but the solution won't work on some older browsers.
You could offer the user the choice between old-style FILE upload, Flash uploader (which bypasses all problems as it doesn't rely on the browser but on Flash code), Java FTP upload control (same thing, but sometimes with some protocol and firewall issues since it doesn't use HTTP as the container web page does), and AJAX HTML5 chunking, possibly based on browser capabilities.
I.e., a user with IE6 would see a form saying
SORRY!
Your browser does not support large file uploads and progress bar.
To send a file of no more than XXX meg,
[ ] [Choose file...] [ >> BEGIN UPLOAD >>> ]
I have three weeks looking for this:
I have this page which have to download a file after verifying the data given by the user. I do the validation and execute an external script which gives me an URL. And I use that URL to download another file which I'm gonna execute later.
I'd tried to download the file with curl, wget, file_put_content, javascript, ajax and jquery with no luck, the file is 150MB+ so I created a nice progress bar to tell the user how the download is going and already have a method to read the downloaded size.
I fact I'm able to download the file with cURL, but the problem is that the "do_form.php" won't load until the file is completely downloaded, so I want to load the page first, then download the file - in the background -, so I can show the user the progress of the download.
Please tell me that this is possible... Thanks!!
Have a look at Gearman. Maybe a gearman background job fits your needs. This job can even run on the same machine as the web server. Of course the early response to the page has the disadvantage that it contains no success information. You will need to poll for that information using AJAX again.
If you decide to do so, you should also have a look at GearmanManager as this eases things a lot.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to get the progress of a file upload with PHP and/or Kohana. My script can upload images, videos, zip, exe, whatever I want really. However the larger the file the longer the user has to wait without any indication.
I was hoping to use some AJAX here to initialise the upload and then report back the progress.
Is this possible with PHP... and can anyone give me an indication of where to start looking.
there is a file upload progress extension for php, see http://www.ultramegatech.com/blog/2010/10/create-an-upload-progress-bar-with-php-and-jquery/ for how to use it.
I like to use a server module to do this sort of thing, mainly because it makes my life as a web developer easier if all I need to do is grab upload statistics from a URL. Nothing has to be changed in your website.
For Nginx there is the Upload Progress module and it should work on all recent releases. You can find code examples on the Nginx Wiki: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpUploadProgressModule
For Apache there is the Upload Progress too. I haven't used it myself, but it seems fairly straight forward.
If you don't have access to the server configuration, then you might want to fall back onto a pure flash / javascript solution. For this I had good luck with Uploadify in the past, but it requires a bit more work as you now have to upload files in a separate request. Someone should be able to suggest a good HTML5 upload progress plugin too.
you could do this also with apache and APC example
How can I create a file upload progress bar with PHP and jQuery? Please don't refer me to Flash stuff like Uploadify. I want to create my own.
Just store and update the progress in server side session and use repeated ajaxical calls from the client side on to obtain the current progress from the server side session until it gets 100%. Long story short, here's a clear tutorial how to do it with PHP and jQuery: How to build an ajax progress bar with jQuery and PHP.
Then the server side part, you need at least PHP 5.2 for this with the PECL Uploadprogress extension. You can find here a blog about it: PECL Uploadprogress example. This comment of jazfresh on php.net is also helpful.
If you don't want to use an already prebuilt one like swfupload you'll have to get your action-script-fu ready and use the external interface api to make it talk with jQuery.
Basically you'll need to control how much data is sent in some time span. As you don't control your browser data transfer, neither how your browser read data from your file, you can't do that with plain Javascript.
You'll need some 3rd party control, like Silverlight, Flash or Java applets. Using them you'll have granted that filesystem access, so you can control how to read your source file. So, to build your progress bar, you just need to make several HTTP calls to your server application sending your source file in small pieces.
To get file(s) upload progress you should use Flash. A tutorial with more info can be found here. Note that this is using .NET though, not PHP.
I'm using CURL to upload files to a service.
currently I'm getting the file content with $GLOBALS["HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA"] then save it on my server.
after that, I'm using CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS with the file's full path.
Is there a way to send the file content directly, without saving it on my server, as if I saved it?
Or is there a way to upload a Photo from a flash app to facebook album, without saving it on the server?
Thanks
If you are uploading data you might consider using the file upload mechanism in PHP http://php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.php It automatically handls file upload PHP.
If you want to redirect the upload to another (third party service) without needing to be in the chain of commands (i.e. user->3rd party server), you might want to look into AJAX. AFAIK when you upload a file using PHP/forms the file will be uploaded to your PHP temp directory and there is no way to prevent this because:
1. To access the file it needs to be on the server (PHP is server execute meaning it can not execute on the user side)
2. I do not believe any user will want you to access their files on their computer nor will you be able to do so(Firewall, AV), if that were to happen it will be a major security issue
As I said above, what you want to look into is AJAX (I used jquery and their AJAX methods are very simple). Because AJAX is user execute javascript it can run on the machine and initiate a connection to any URL. This way you can directly access the service without submitting the file to your server.
Here is an exmaple AJAX upload (you can google for more):
http://valums.com/ajax-upload/
Hope this helps