It's too big for email, what do I do now?

December 15, 2005 4:38 PM

I'm looking for a simple web FTP interface to allow clients to upload files to my web server. I'm using Dreamhost, so it has to be installable on standard Apache / PHP / MySQL, etc. I'd like to have a simple "upload file" area in the client's section where they choose 1-3 files and click "upload."
posted by letitrain to computers & internet (10 comments total)

It isn't an FTP client, but I've used FileThingie for simple uploads. It's extremely simple to install, and provides nice little features that the linked page explains well.
posted by odinsdream at 5:03 PM on December 15, 2005

Just write your own, look up multi-part forms. Make sure you sanitize your users input.
posted by Mr T at 5:25 PM on December 15, 2005

Mr T is right. If you can program in PHP it is rather straight forward. Reference material and some sample code. Here is a tutorial which lays it out step by step.
posted by Roger Dodger at 9:01 PM on December 15, 2005

YouSendIt.com is a good resource to transfer files up to 1GB from one person to another. And it's free!
posted by lunarboy at 9:19 PM on December 15, 2005

I can't program in PHP, but I can follow directions and I'm comfortable working with web inards, so I'll give it a shot. I still have to believe there is a simple solution out there that requires only configuration...

lunarboy, I'm not interested in external solutions. I want to integrate this into the client section of my site.
posted by letitrain at 9:51 PM on December 15, 2005

If you and your users don't mind a Java applet, I wrote a small tool to do this for a friend's website. It is designed to be as fool proof as possible and can be locked down to only upload to specific directories via easy to use parameters. It uploads using standard FTP, no server support is required.
You can view a demo of it here. If you are interested, email me (my address is on the my homepage) and I can send you the documentation.
It's free to use.
posted by AndrewStephens at 11:39 PM on December 15, 2005

File Thingie is super easy to set up. Only allows one file at a time though. I'm sure there are equivalent options for multiple uploads or look at how this one works and make changes. Maybe try one of these.
posted by miniape at 6:54 AM on December 16, 2005

I'd caution against writing your own. I worked at a webshop once that had an upload tool attached to their forums. The images were supposed to be held at a hard-to-find URL until they were approved by a moderator.

A user worked out where the images were going, and we ended up with 70GB of Chinese porn on our website in a matter of hours.

(I should point out that porn was not our core business ...)
posted by scruss at 7:20 AM on December 16, 2005

I use net2ftp. Note that in many cases PHP puts limits on the maximum upload size.
posted by Sharcho at 9:20 AM on December 16, 2005

Have a look at Owl Ultralite - it's a cut-down version of the full Owl document storage software and might be perfect for you. Bottom of the page.
posted by blag at 3:16 PM on December 18, 2005