PUT method support

PUT method support has changed between PHP 3 and PHP 4. In PHP 4, one should use the standard input stream to read the contents of an HTTP PUT.

PHP provides support for the HTTP PUT method used by clients such as Netscape Composer and W3C Amaya. PUT requests are much simpler than a file upload and they look something like this:

PUT /path/filename.html HTTP/1.1

This would normally mean that the remote client would like to save the content that follows as: /path/filename.html in your web tree. It is obviously not a good idea for Apache or PHP to automatically let everybody overwrite any files in your web tree. So, to handle such a request you have to first tell your web server that you want a certain PHP script to handle the request. In Apache you do this with the Script directive. It can be placed almost anywhere in your Apache configuration file. A common place is inside a <Directory> block or perhaps inside a <Virtualhost> block. A line like this would do the trick:

Script PUT /put.php

This tells Apache to send all PUT requests for URIs that match the context in which you put this line to the put.php script. This assumes, of course, that you have PHP enabled for the .php extension and PHP is active.

Inside your put.php file you would then do something like this:

This would copy the file to the location requested by the remote client. You would probably want to perform some checks and/or authenticate the user before performing this file copy. The only trick here is that when PHP sees a PUT-method request it stores the uploaded file in a temporary file just like those handled by the POST-method. When the request ends, this temporary file is deleted. So, your PUT handling PHP script has to copy that file somewhere. The filename of this temporary file is in the $PHP_PUT_FILENAME variable, and you can see the suggested destination filename in the $REQUEST_URI (may vary on non-Apache web servers). This destination filename is the one that the remote client specified. You do not have to listen to this client. You could, for example, copy all uploaded files to a special uploads directory.