Upload 1GB files using chunking in PHP

Question

I have a web application that accepts file uploads of up to 4 MB. The server side script is PHP and web server is NGINX. Many users have requested to increase this limit drastically to allow upload of video etc.

However there seems to be no easy solution for this problem with PHP. First, on the client side I am looking for something that would allow me to chunk files during transfer. SWFUpload does not seem to do that. I guess I can stream uploads using Java FX (http://blogs.oracle.com/rakeshmenonp/entry/javafx_upload_file) but I can not find any equivalent of request.getInputStream in PHP.

Increasing browser client_post limits or php.ini upload or max_execution times is not really a solution for really large files (~ 1GB) because maybe the browser will time out and think of all those blobs stored in memory.

Is there any way to solve this problem using PHP on server side? I would appreciate your replies.

Answer 1

plupload is a javascript/php library, and it's quite easy to use and allows chunking.

It uses HTML5 though.

Answer 2

Take a look at tus protocol which is a HTTP based protocol for resumable file uploads so you can carry on where you left off without re-uploading whole data again in case of any interruptions. This protocol has also been adopted by vimeo from May, 2017.

You can find various implementations of the protocol in different languages here. In your case, you can use its javascript client called uppy and use golang or php based server implementation in a server.