File Uploads

Overview

This tutorial will show you how to upload a file to a Mongoose web server.

Build and run

Follow the Build Tools tutorial to setup your development environment. Then start a command prompt / terminal and enter the following:

git clone https://github.com/cesanta/mongoose
cd mongoose/examples/file-upload-html-form
make

Possible approaches

There are two possible scenarios:

1. The file to be uploaded is small - significantly smaller than the amount of free RAM. For example, we're running Mongoose on an embedded Linux system with 64MB of RAM, and uploading some JSON configuration about 1KB in size. In this case, we can use a standard HTML form upload, and receive the whole file in one POST request.
2. The file to be uploaded is large - compared to the amount of free RAM, or significantly more than that. For example, we want to upload a new filesystem image of size 512KB to an ESP8266 device which has about 30KB of free RAM. In this case, there is no way to hold the whole file in memory. It should be handled in small chunks, and Mongoose should receive each chunk and append it to the written file, until everything is received. Here we could follow two paths:
   • Send a file using a single POST request, passing file content as-is as the POST body - i.e. use binary upload
   • Split a file in small chunks (e.g. 2Kb) on a client side, and send each chunk as an individual POST request

Form upload

This method uses a standard HTML upload form, and works when file size is significantly less than free RAM.

• Build and run the form upload example

  cd mongoose/examples/file-upload-html-form
  make clean all
  

• Go to http://localhost:8000 in your browser
• Click on "Browse...", select a file to upload
• Click on "submit form". You should see a "Thank you!" message
• Check the web server logs:

  2021-11-05 02:02:22 2 main.c:22:cb    New request to: [/upload], body size: 1991
  2021-11-05 02:02:22 2 main.c:28:cb    Chunk name: [field1] filename: [] length: 19 bytes
  2021-11-05 02:02:22 2 main.c:28:cb    Chunk name: [file1] filename: [hello.txt] length: 1698 bytes
  

Let's see how that worked.

• The web server serves static content from the web_root folder, which shows an upload form:

• When a file is selected, and the "submit form" button gets hit, the browser sends a request like this, where every form field is wrapped between "boundary markers":

  POST /upload HTTP/1.1
  ...other headers...
  Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----MyBound123
  
  ------MyBound123
  Content-Disposition: form-data; name="field1"
  
  type some text here
  ------MyBound123
  Content-Disposition: form-data; name="file1"; filename="hello.txt"
  Content-Type: text/x-chdr
  
  ... CONTENTS OF THE FILE hello.txt ...
  ------MyBound123--
  

• Mongoose receives that request, fully buffers it in memory, and then iterates over every form field using the mg_http_next_multipart() function:

• There, the code simply logs everything. Alternatively, we could save an uploaded file, or write to a flash region, etcetera.

The source code for this example is available at examples/file-upload-html-form

Binary upload, signle POST

When Mongoose receives a large HTTP request, it buffers incoming data, and for each received chunk of data, it generates MG_EV_HTTP_CHUNK request. When a full HTTP message is buffered, then a last, zero-length MG_EV_HTTP_CHUNK is generated, followed by MG_EV_HTTP_MSG.

The server side, however, may not wait until the full message is buffered in memory, but it can delete the incoming chunk using the mg_http_delete_chunk() function. If chunks are deleted, then MG_EV_HTTP_MSG is not generated after the final zero-length chunk. This way, a server can process chunks as they arrive - for example, by writing a chunk into a file.

The MG_EV_HTTP_CHUNK messages are also generated for the form uploads. However, Mongoose does not strip multipart markers. If form-uploaded message is saved to a file, it'll contain multipart markers.

0-length chunk is the last chunk. Use the MG_IO_SIZE build constant to limit the maximum chunk size on the server side.

• Build and run the single POST example

  cd mongoose/examples/file-upload-single-post
  make clean all
  

• Go to http://localhost:8000 in your browser
• Click on "choose file...", select a file to upload
• You should see a result upload message showing the file size
• Check the web server logs, you should see each chunk details printed:

  18149d3d440 2 main.c:17:cb              Got chunk len 1448
  18149d3d440 2 main.c:18:cb              Query string: [name=myfile]
  

  To have the file contents printed, just remove the comments in the example
• You can also try using curl:

  curl -H Expect: --data-binary @filename http://localhost:8000/upload?name=myfile
  ok (chunked)
  

• In particular, we can instruct curl to use chunked transfer encoding and it will send the file in chunks:

  curl -H Expect: -H "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" --data-binary @filename http://localhost:8000/upload?name=myfile
  ok (chunked)
  

  In this case, curl used 16372-byte chunks:

  18149d445c0 2 main.c:17:cb              Got chunk len 16372
  18149d445c0 2 main.c:18:cb              Query string: [name=myfile]
  

Let's see how that worked.

• The web server serves static content from the web_root folder, which shows an upload form:

• When a file is selected, the browser runs a JS snippet that sends it over to the server:

• The server receives each chunk, processes it and deletes it. When the last chunk is received, sends a response.

The source code for this example is available at examples/file-upload-single-post

Binary upload, multiple POSTs

Another way to upload a big file is to split the transfer into several POSTs.

The function mg_http_upload() can parse a POST request with extra information in the query string parameters.

• Build and run the multiple POSTs example

  cd mongoose/examples/file-upload-multiple-posts
  make clean all
  

• Go to http://localhost:8000 in your browser
• Click on "choose file...", select a file to upload
• You should see a file upload progress indication
• Check your file system, your file should be there

Windows users: the example writes the file to /tmp, create a TMP directory in your C: drive

Let's see how that worked.

• The web server serves static content from the web_root folder, which shows an upload form:

• When a file is selected, the browser runs a JS snippet that splits the file content and sends it over in several POSTs, each 2KB in length. In the query string, we send the file name and the offset within the file as parameters:

• The server receives each POST request and handles it to mg_http_upload(), that appends the contents to the specified file at the specified offset

  Note we remove any possibility for the caller to point to a directory above the one selected, and we also limit the maximum file size to be below 100KB.

The source code for this example is available at examples/file-upload-multiple-posts