PHP File Uploader

Dustin Ingram

August 11 2009

1 Intro

My friend needed an easy way to upload and embed audio clips to her blog, so I took a little bit of time to write a Simple PHP File Uploader. It's surprisingly easy to do if you've got access to a webserver and some PHP knowledge, so I'll attempt to outline some basic steps below.

If you're interested in how I actually did the embedding, you should check out Embedding Audio using Google's MP3 Player.

2 The HTML form

We need a basic HTML form to accept our file to upload and pass it off to the PHP script:

<form action="index.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
   <label for="file">File:</label>
   <input type="file" name="file" id="file" />
   <input type="submit" name="submit" value="UPLOAD!" />
</form>

2.1 The PHP magic

Now for the PHP script. The code below checks the filetype of the uploaded file (in the $_FILES[] array). I've included a few for gif, jpeg, and png, but most audio will fall under x-mp3 and mpeg:

<?
if ($_FILES["file"]["type"] != "")
{
   if (($_FILES["file"]["type"] == "image/gif")
      || ($_FILES["file"]["type"] == "image/jpeg")
         || ($_FILES["file"]["type"] == "image/png")
            || ($_FILES["file"]["type"] == "audio/x-mp3")
               || ($_FILES["file"]["type"] == "audio/mpeg")
            )
   { ... }
}
?>

Some other useful information you can get out of the file:

<?
echo "Upload: " . $_FILES["file"]["name"] . "<br />";
echo "Type: " . $_FILES["file"]["type"] . "<br />";
echo "Size: " . ($_FILES["file"]["size"] / 1024) . " Kb<br />";
?>

To make sure the filename isn't already there:

<?
if (file_exists("upload/" . $_FILES["file"]["name"]))
{
   echo $_FILES["file"]["name"] . " already exists. ";
}
?>

To put the uploaded file in your $upload folder:

<?
move_uploaded_file($_FILES["file"]["tmp_name"],$upload . $_FILES["file"]["name"]);
?>

Of course, once you've got a big upload directory of random files, it's useless unless you're able to click on them to download later. This is assuming you've got the default directory $dir:

<?
if (is_dir($dir)) {
   if ($dh = opendir($dir)) {
      while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false) {
         if($file!="." && $file!="..")
         {
            echo "<a href=\"$dir$file\"><b>$file</b></a> [<a href=\"./$file\">Download</a>] [" . 
               date(DATE_RFC822,filemtime("$dir$file")) . 
               "]<br />";
         }
      }
      closedir($dh);
   }
}
?>

A nice one-liner to note here is how we get and parse the date for the files:

<?
date(DATE_RFC822,filemtime("$dir$file"))
?>

And those are all the pieces you need! Be sure to check out Embedding Audio using Google's MP3 Player if you're interested in how I actually did the embedding.