More on ZIP File Creation

by R.I. Pienaar | May 25, 2005 | Code

I did some more testing with the code I posted yesterday and found it isn’t 100% compatible with some unzip programs. Works with unix unzip, Mac OS X default tool, WinZip, WinRAR but annoyingly not with the default XP zip folder thing.

The problem seem to be 4 rogue bytes that gets inserted somewhere. So back to Google, eventually I found a much better library at PHP Concept Library Zip. It works more or less the same, except you must pass it files to add instead of just data in variables, either works for me.

Some sample code:

require ("incl/pclzip.lib.php");
$zipfile = new PclZip('zipfile.zip');
$v_list = $zipfile->create('incl/pclzip.lib.php');
if ($v_list == 0) {
die ("Error: " . $zipfile->errorInfo(true));
}
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=zipfile.zip");
readfile("zipfile.zip");

This one works with every unzip tool I’ve tried, Windows, OS X, command line unzip etc. It also has decent error reporting etc.

Creating ZIP files with PHP

by R.I. Pienaar | May 24, 2005 | Code

UPDATE: You are better off using the library mentioned in this post.

As part of my previously mentioned OpenVPN CA I want to deliver keys, certs and config files to users in a single zip file that they can just extract onto their computers. PHP’s own ZIP File Functions only supports reading zip files and not making them.

Some Googling discovered an article by John Coggeshall that can create zip files. It does this by creating the binary data on the fly and can output the zip files directly to the browser from memory or by writing it to disk.

I had some troubles getting hold of a usable version of this code since all these PHP code collection sites have this annoying habit of only showing the syntax highlighted versions of the code rather than give a download link. Eventually got one though and I figured I’ll host a mirror of it here to help people out.

Using it is very simple, this is a quick sample that will create a ZIP file and add one directory and one file into then send it directly to the client.

<?
require ("incl/zipfile.inc.php");
$zipfile = new zipfile();
$filedata = implode("", file("incl/zipfile.inc.php"));
$zipfile->add_dir("incl/");
$zipfile->add_file($filedata, "incl/zipfile.inc.php");
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-disposition: attachment; filename=zipfile.zip");
echo $zipfile->file();
?>

Apache + PHP + OpenSSL

by R.I. Pienaar | May 20, 2005 | Code

I’ve been trying to write a web based certificate authority to help make signing up for my OpenVPN installation easier for the users. Till now we used OpenVPN GUI for WIndows that provides a frontend to SSL for creating the CSR’s. It’s all a pain and way beyond what our users can manage in general so a nice web front-end is called for.
I read that PHP has bindings to the OpenSSL libraries so I thought I’d try and use that. I had endless hassles with Apache though, it would just die the moment I call the openssl_* functions in PHP or things would just return FALSE without any useful errors. I tried this on 4 FreeBSD machines all with Apache 1.x on, eventually I found it worked fine on Apache 2 machines! Upgraded one of the systems and it’s all good now.
Writing the SSL stuff is very simple with PHP, I’ll soon have a full implementation of a Certificate Authority done that is fully web driven so if there are any interest in this I may clean it up and release it under some Open Source licence, will also put up some code samples later but for now just wanted to point out that to get this stuff going you need Apache 2 it seems, well at least on FreeBSD machines.
The full entry has some screenshots of where I am today with the CA so you can get an idea of what I am getting at.

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