FTP Images

Nixon

Hey all,

I am currently in the middle of making a guitar classifieds website. On these classifieds I am having an image upload form. THis works using http at the moment and uploads to a directory on my harddrive. Now I want to beable upload the images to an ftp. How would I go about doing this. Baring in mind I have never used ftp before. Can you set a password to log into the ftp using PHP, so people can't log in under anonmous.

Thanks.

Jack.

gat

im doing something similar for my website too, so ill be interested on this one....

AstroTeg

FTP is a seperate animal from HTTP. Most people use PHP to play with HTTP.

FTP is designed just to transfer files to and from the FTP server. The FTP server is sort of in its own world - it doesn't interact with others unlike how Apache can integrate PHP, Perl, and other nifty tools.

So to allow folks to FTP their files to you, you'd have to setup/configure the FTP server and ideally a seperate FTP account. You'd probably want to lock down this FTP account so all they can do is upload files to a particular directory. You don't want to give them access to your web site files. At the same time, you'd probably online want to be able to have them upload files and not download or delete, or they may damage other people's uploaded files.

Can you use PHP to do this? In theory, you could build your own socket server to behave like an FTP server. But if your server already has an FTP server listening for connections, you can't have a PHP socket server listening on the same port. Which means you have to change the port and means you have to tell your FTP users to use the new port, which they may get confused about. On top of this, you'd have to have your socket server handle all the FTP commands (or only the ones you're interested in using).

Why not use PHP's built in FTP commands? Well, those commands are strictly for PHP scripts to connect and manage connections to existing FTP servers. For what you're looking to do, it doesn't make sense to use PHP. What might make sense is if a user didn't have FTP, you could setup a PHP page to allow for an HTTP upload. Then once the file makes it to the server, you could (for example) use the FTP commands built into PHP to transfer that file to another server that only has FTP. Not the most practical example, but it is an example.

Nixon

Hi, I kind of understand what your saying, so from that what would you suggest I do. If you have ever used ebay I want the picture upload to work kinda like that. I would like the pictures to be hosted elsewhere that my webpage server (bandwidth expences and other problems) so what should I do.

AstroTeg

Its a matter of how creative you want to be, how much time you want to spend, and how robust you want to make it.

FTP isn't the friendliest option to present to the user. I'd say an HTTP upload form is probably the way to go - its simple, the user has probably seen it before, they don't need anything other than a browser and they have that already.

If you want the image somewhere else, thats fine. You have the image get uploaded via HTTP and you have your PHP code move it to where you want the file to finally stay. If need be, you could have PHP FTP the file to another server that has FTP running. Some might say thats a security risk since the other server has FTP running. If the servers are physically close by, you could have the servers talk directly to each other and send the files that way.

weekender

just helped a dude with some code to do just that...

http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10263070

AstroTeg

I saw that post. I'm not sold that is going to work.

I mean, your goal is to get an image from a client machine to a web server. The client is NOT running an FTP server. How are you going to have the web server initiate an FTP session with a client that is not running an FTP server?

I would think you're best hope would be to provide a link on the web site to pass the browser off to the web server's FTP server. The trick would be to walk the user through finding the file and uploading.

weekender

have a look at the code; it does work

what it does it gives the user a form where he/she can upload an image to the server. Then the server ftp's the file to the remote server. The client doesn't need an ftp - they just need a browser that can handle uploads (they all do)