Month: November 2008

Two and a half years ago I began working with Amazon Web Services — first with S3 and then SQS and EC2. The code was eventually cleaned up and released as an open source project called PHP-AWS. Since then, it has remained relatively unchanged. Just bug fixes and the occasional support for new AWS features when users contribute patches. It’s not particularly pretty, but it has stood up well against time. The S3 class was recommended by Raymond Yee in his book Pro Web 2.0 Mashups, and a number of people have emailed examples of production sites where the library is being used.

Still, the biggest drawback (particularly with the S3 class) was that the curl commands were piped to the shell — they didn’t use PHP’s native curl extension. This was done to bypass PHP’s memory limits to allow large file uploads (and also because we didn’t have time to find a workaround). It was a dirty hack, plain and simple.

But, today, the S3 class redeems itself with full support for PHP’s curl extension. Not only do large file uploads work (I just tested a 1.5GB disk image), but there is support for new S3 features like query string authentication and copying objects.

As this is a complete rewrite, I consider it a beta release — user beware. I’ve converted over all of my own code to use the new class, which has given it a good bit of testing. It’s stable enough for my purposes, but I don’t want anyone to be surprised if there’s a bug or three lurking about.

Download the code, kick the tires, and please report any bugs you find.

This afternoon I needed an easy way to upload files to Amazon S3 and set specific headers on them. I’ve built one-off scripts like this in the past, but this time I wanted to generalize the problem into a reusable shell command.

I pulled in some code from PHP-AWS and got it working fairly quickly. However, I got swamped with an ugly nest of if and switch statements when I began adding support for multiple arguments and switches. A quick Google search didn’t find any ready-made PHP solutions, so I rolled my own.

It’s a small class — about 60 lines. It could easily be turned into a single function instead, but I like using classes as ad-hoc namespaces. Anyway, it’s fairly robust for a twenty minute solution. Here are a few examples of the syntax it supports.

cmd -a -b -c // Single letter flags

cmd -abc // Same as above

Beyond setting a few flags, you can also assign values to those flags.

cmd -a foobar.jpg -bc

In this case, b and c are set just like the previous example. And a is set to the value foobar.jpg as you’d expect.

Double-dash, long names are also supported.

cmd --some-flag
cmd --another-flag=charlie // You can use an equal sign
cmd --another-flag charlie // Or not. It's up to you.

And those can be mixed with the single dash variants.

cmd -ab --bigflag=foo -c bar apricot orange

So, a and b are set. bigflag is set to “foo” and c is set to “bar”. “apricot” and “orange” will appear as arguments not associated with any specific flag.

My point is that you can use nearly any standard Unix convention.

So, given that last example, here’s how you’d parse it using the PHP class.

<?PHP
    $args = new Args();

    if($args->flag('a'))
        // -a was set, so do something

    if($args->flag('bigflag') == 'foo')
        // --bigflag was set to 'foo'

    foreach($args->args as $arg)
        // Do something with each argument.
        // Args will be bar, apricot, and orange.

So that’s it. The class doesn’t assume much. It just picks out what you give it. It’s up to you, the programmer, to interpret those results.

As always, the code is released under the MIT License and available here.