PHP - File Upload

PHP - File Upload

A very useful aspect of PHP is its ability to manage file uploads to your server. Allowing users to upload a file to your server opens a whole can of worms, so please be careful when enabling file uploads.

PHP - File Upload: HTML Form

Before you can use PHP to manage your uploads, you must first build an HTML form that lets
users select a file to upload. See our HTML Form
lesson for a more in-depth look at forms.

HTML Code:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="uploader.php" method="POST">

<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="100000" />
Choose a file to upload: <input name="uploadedfile" type="file" /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Upload File" />
</form>

Here is a brief description of the important parts of the above code:

• enctype="multipart/form-data" - Necessary for our to-be-created PHP file to function properly.
• action="uploader.php" - The name of our PHP page that will be created, shortly.
• method="POST" - Informs the browser that we want to send information to the server using POST.
• input type="hidden" name="MA... - Sets the maximum allowable file size, in bytes, that can be uploaded. This
  safety mechanism is easily bypassed and we will show a solid backup solution in PHP. We have set the max file size to
  100KB in this example.
• input name="uploadedfile" - uploadedfile is how we will access the file in our PHP script.

Save that form code into a file and call it upload.html. If you view it in a browser it should look
like this: