Fighting downtime one pf rule at a time!

So I started writing a netboot server for floor. I decided to start writing the web interface first, and learn myself some mason, web perl, and database-y things. Also found some things out about the process that were a little undocumented/misdocumented (now a word).

The biggest issue (so far) was file uploads. So here’s a quick tutorial on how to do file uploads with perl, with mason.

In index.html (or wherever your form HTML code lives):

<form method="post" action="upload.mas" enctype="multipart/form-data">
  <input type="file" name="file_name" /><br />
  <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

In upload.mas:

<%init>
use Apache2::Upload;
# $r is an Apache2::RequestRec, not an Apache2::Request like some places say it is
my $req = Apache2::Request->new($r);
# file_name refers to the form name you had in your HTML
my $upload = $req->upload('file_name');
my $fh = $upload->fh;
open OUTFILE, ">$where_ever_you_wanna_save_the)file";
binmode $fh;
binmode OUTFILE;
print OUTFILE $line foreach my $line (<$fh>);
close OUTFILE;
close $fh;
</%init>

In your httpd.conf:

APREQ2_READLIMIT 2G # Sets the max size of your user's uploads to 2GB

I intentionally skipped over error handling code and all of the httpd.conf config for the sake of brevity (I did say brief tutorial). Since I need to allow for larger file sizes than Apache does by default (64MB), I spent quite some time looking for that Apache directive.

Hopefully this saves someone some time.