file downloading using apache

Anon

im trying to download files that are outside of a web directory using a php script, however, these files are in many different formats (ie mp3, jpg ect..), and when i use my code to do it,the headers i send seem somewhat buggy. What i want to do is to somehow use apache to serve the file for me, that way it will recognize file types and save me a lot of code.

Anon

Well you could just create a virtual directory for them, they are on the same server right? Just not in the web folder?

Just toss in a little line to your httpd.conf file in your Apache config directory.

ScriptAlias /files/ "/filelocation/"

Naturaly you'd replace the filelocation with the directory where the files are located, basicly what this does is puts that directory and everything inside of it on the site without actualy having the files physicly in the webroot.

So the user would end up accessing those files like so:

http://webserver.com/files/filename.mp3

of if it was inside a direcotry in that directory, like so:

http://webserver.com/files/directoryname/filename.mp3

This works as long as the files are located somewhere on the serve machine and (I'm not sure about this one) posibly on a shared local network.

Anon

Well, the user needs to authenticate through my script before he can download the file, i decided to keep the files outside the web directory for security reasons, and for the most part, the files are in several different directories.

Anon

I have a similar problem, is there a way to take advantage of Apache's MIME magic?

On a related note, are you using PHP4 with sessions? I seem to have problems when using session_start() in the same script as header("Content-Type: application/whatever").

--JW

Anon

As a matter of fact I am using php4 sessions, and i do have some problems, although i dont think they are directly linked to sessions, since i dont think that it matters in what order any kind of headers are called. My problem is when i specify the file size in the headers, 1 out of 3 times a file is downloaded it will dump the contents to the screen.

Anon

I dunno-- just for the heck of it try commenting out session_start() and then hardcode your variables and see if it doesn't suddenly start working. In my app none of my header() calls work right (even if I call them as the first line in a script that includes nothing else) as long as I have session_start() anywhere else in the script.

I am using PHP 4.0.2, is this a bug? I don't get any errors logged, but my browser chokes on any script that contains a header("Content-Type: ...") along with session_start().

--JW