Proper way to upload files and display them safely later

Need Help
1

Hi everybody, what’s the proper way of uploading and displaying files, i.e. not placing and storing them in uploads folder?

2

I would say it depends on what you do with your uploaded files to find a “proper way”.

  • Do you want to reference them with other content on your website?
  • Are you providing downloadable files to other users?
  • Are all uploaded files public?
  • Do you only upload images or other files like PDFs, text, movies etc. as well?

As a start you can try out GitHub - brandcom/cakephp-assets: Backend Asset Management for CakePHP and see if it provides you with some basic functionality you desire.

For public files I have no problem with a static folder in the webroot folder which I reference throughout my code via 1 config value like Files.profile_picture_path so I don’t need an extra table which holds all my assets.

But again, it all depends on what you want to do.

3

Thank you for your answer @KevinPfeifer. My site is a site that collects various personal certificates in pdf format. I would like to allow only signed users to download data.

My idea is to e.g. store data in a folder like e.g. resources and to copy to file to webroot folder just for a short period of time when it should be available for download.

Nevertheless I believe that there is surely a better way how to perform this in cakephp.

4

You can easily make files downloadable which are NOT part of the webroot folder.
Try doing this at the top of any of your index() actions inside your controller

return $this->response->withFile(APP . 'Application.php');

and call that URL
You will recieve the Application.php as a downloadable file from your src directory.

5

Once more thank you very much for your hint. Based on what you wrote I just read few lines in cookbook here Request & Response Objects - 4.x and everything works as it should now. And I even learned something new. Once more thank you @KevinPfeifer !