CURL call not uploading the file from local to remote server PHP

Question

Hi I am having the following CURL call which will upload the local text file to another location, as of now in localhost only (ie. for testing purpose, once it runs successfully

Answer 1

Try the following code, I have updated it according to your need. Also when we post a file it will not be displayed using $_POST as you are doing, instead to see files you need to print $_FILES

I have not tested your code, but to me, it seems fine. Your major mistake is that you are printing the upload file using $_POST. File uploads are available in $_FILES array. Try to print that.

Upload file: (This is compatible even with older versions of PHP) Please note that, for compatibity purpose, when CURLFile is not available (for PHP less than 5.5) I have used file_get_contents.

=')) {
        echo "Upload will be done using CURLFile\n";
        upload($file); //CURL file upload using CURLFile for PHP v5.5 or greater
    }else{
        echo "Upload will be done without CURLFile\n";
        compatibleUpload($file); //CURL file upload without CURLFile for PHP less than v5.5
    }
}

//Upload file using CURLFile
function upload($file){
    $target = "http://localhost:8888/upload_file.php";
    $host = parse_url($target);

    $cFile = new CURLFile($file,'text/plain', $file);
    $data = array(
        'log_file' => $cFile,
    );

    //you can play around with headers, and adjust as per your need
    $agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.101 Safari/537.36';
    $curlHeaders = array(
        'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8',
        'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate',
        'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8',
        'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.101 Safari/537.36', //change user agent if you want
        'Connection: Keep-Alive',
        'Pragma: no-cache',
        'Referer: http://localhost:8888/upload.php', //you can change referer, if you want or remove it
        'Host: ' . $host['host'] . (isset($host['port']) ? ':' . $host['port'] : null), // building host header
        'Cache-Control: max-age=0',
        'Cookie: __utma=61117235.2020578233.1500534080.1500894744.1502696111.4; __utmz=61117235.1500534080.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)', //adjust your cookie if you want
        'Expect:  '
    );

    $curl = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $target);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER  , true); //we need header
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT,$agent);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $curlHeaders);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); // stop verifying certificate
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true); // enable posting
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data); // post images 
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); // if any redirection after upload
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SAFE_UPLOAD, true);
    $r = curl_exec($curl);
    if (curl_errno($curl)) {
        $error = curl_error($curl);
        print_r($error);
    } else {
        // check the HTTP status code of the request
        $resultStatus = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
        if ($resultStatus != 200) {
            print_r($resultStatus);
        }else{
            //successfull
            print_r($r);
        }
    }
    curl_close($curl);
}

//Upload file without using CURLFile, because we are upload a file, so we need to generate form boundry
function compatibleUpload($file){
    $target = "http://localhost:8888/upload_file.php";
    //use this to send any post parameters expect file types
    //if you are not sending any other post params expect file, just assign an empty array
    // $assoc = array(
    //     'name' => 'demo',
    //     'status' => '1'
    // );
    $assoc = array(); //like this

    //this array is used to send files
    $files = array('log_file' => $file);

    static $disallow = array("\0", "\"", "\r", "\n");

    // build normal parameters
    foreach ($assoc as $k => $v) {
        $k = str_replace($disallow, "_", $k);
        $body[] = implode("\r\n", array(
            "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"{$k}\"",
            "",
            filter_var($v), 
        ));
    }

    // build file parameters
    foreach ($files as $k => $v) {
        switch (true) {
            case false === $v = realpath(filter_var($v)):
            case !is_file($v):
            case !is_readable($v):
                continue; // or return false, throw new InvalidArgumentException
        }
        $data = file_get_contents($v);
        $v = call_user_func("end", explode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $v));
        $k = str_replace($disallow, "_", $k);
        $v = str_replace($disallow, "_", $v);
        $body[] = implode("\r\n", array(
            "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"{$k}\"; filename=\"{$v}\"",
            "Content-Type: application/octet-stream",
            "",
            $data, 
        ));
    }

    // generate safe boundary 
    do {
        $boundary = "---------------------" . md5(mt_rand() . microtime());
    } while (preg_grep("/{$boundary}/", $body));

    // add boundary for each parameters
    array_walk($body, function (&$part) use ($boundary) {
        $part = "--{$boundary}\r\n{$part}";
    });

    // add final boundary
    $body[] = "--{$boundary}--";
    $body[] = "";

    // set options
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $target);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER  , true); //we need header
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); // stop verifying certificate
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
    curl_setopt_array($ch, array(
        CURLOPT_POST       => true,
        CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => implode("\r\n", $body),
        CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
            "Expect: ",
            "Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary={$boundary}", // change Content-Type
        ),
    ));
    $r = curl_exec($ch);
    if (curl_errno($ch)) {
        $error = curl_error($ch);
        print_r($error);
    } else {
        // check the HTTP status code of the request
        $resultStatus = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
        if ($resultStatus != 200) {
            print_r($resultStatus);
        }else{
            //successfully uploaded
            print_r($r);
        }
    }
    curl_close($ch);
}
?>

Upload handling:

Sample I tried to upload: (websites.txt)

Sat Sep 9 07:31:18 2017 notifications.google.com 192.168.150.201
Sat Sep 9 07:31:18 2017 notifications.google.com 192.168.150.201
Sat Sep 9 07:31:19 2017 plus.l.google.com 192.168.150.201
Sat Sep 9 07:31:19 2017 plus.l.google.com 192.168.150.201

Output of CURL result (PHP ver 5.5 and up)

Upload will be done using CURLFile
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 07:11:07 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.38
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

Array
(
)
Array
(
    [log_file] => Array
        (
            [name] => websites.txt
            [type] => text/plain
            [tmp_name] => /Applications/MAMP/tmp/php/phpRp8S4T
            [error] => 0
            [size] => 245
        )

)

Output of CURL result (PHP ver less than 5.5, I tested on 5.4.45)

Upload will be done without CURLFile
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 07:17:43 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.45
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

Array
(
)
Array
(
    [log_file] => Array
        (
            [name] => websites.txt
            [type] => application/octet-stream
            [tmp_name] => /Applications/MAMP/tmp/php/phpQWGlEG
            [error] => 0
            [size] => 245
        )

)