When you’re emailing or uploading larger files, it always makes sense to compress them first. This decreases file size and also helps avoid file corruption during transfer. The most common compressed file you will encounter is the zip file, since most operating systems come with a basic utility to quickly zip and unzip files. Creating a small function to upload a zip file to your server and unpack in the process isn’t as complicated as you might think.

First let’s create a simple form that will allow us to browse our computer and upload a zip file.

HTML 


<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="">
<label>Choose a zip file to upload: <input type="file"name="zip_file" /></label>
<br />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Upload" />
</form>
 Now comes the uploader function:
PHP


<?php
if($_FILES["zip_file"]["name"]) {
 $filename = $_FILES["zip_file"]["name"];
 $source = $_FILES["zip_file"]["tmp_name"];
 $type = $_FILES["zip_file"]["type"];
 
 $name = explode(".", $filename);
 $accepted_types = array('application/zip', 'application/x-zip-compressed', 'multipart/x-zip', 'application/x-compressed');
 foreach($accepted_types as $mime_type) {
  if($mime_type == $type) {
   $okay = true;
   break;
  } 
 }
 
 $continue = strtolower($name[1]) == 'zip' ? true : false;
 if(!$continue) {
  $message = "The file you are trying to upload is not a .zip file. Please try again.";
 }

 $target_path = "/home/var/yoursite/httpdocs/".$filename;  // change this to the correct site path
 if(move_uploaded_file($source, $target_path)) {
  $zip = new ZipArchive();
  $x = $zip->open($target_path);
  if ($x === true) {
   $zip->extractTo("/home/var/yoursite/httpdocs/"); // change this to the correct site path
   $zip->close();
 
   unlink($target_path);
  }
  $message = "Your .zip file was uploaded and unpacked.";
 } else { 
  $message = "There was a problem with the upload. Please try again.";
 }
}
?>
To make sure the success and error messages appear, we will also have to add to short pieces of PHP code:
PHP


<?php if($message) echo "<p>$message</p>"; ?>
Putting it all together into a PHP file would look like this:
PHP



<?php
if($_FILES["zip_file"]["name"]) {
 $filename = $_FILES["zip_file"]["name"];
 $source = $_FILES["zip_file"]["tmp_name"];
 $type = $_FILES["zip_file"]["type"];
 
 $name = explode(".", $filename);
 $accepted_types = array('application/zip', 'application/x-zip-compressed', 'multipart/x-zip', 'application/x-compressed');
 foreach($accepted_types as $mime_type) {
  if($mime_type == $type) {
   $okay = true;
   break;
  } 
 }
 
 $continue = strtolower($name[1]) == 'zip' ? true : false;
 if(!$continue) {
  $message = "The file you are trying to upload is not a .zip file. Please try again.";
 }

 $target_path = "/home/var/yoursite/httpdocs/".$filename;  // change this to the correct site path
 if(move_uploaded_file($source, $target_path)) {
  $zip = new ZipArchive();
  $x = $zip->open($target_path);
  if ($x === true) {
   $zip->extractTo("/home/var/yoursite/httpdocs/"); // change this to the correct site path
   $zip->close();
 
   unlink($target_path);
  }
  $message = "Your .zip file was uploaded and unpacked.";
 } else { 
  $message = "There was a problem with the upload. Please try again.";
 }
}
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
<?php if($message) echo "<p>$message</p>"; ?>
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="">
<label>Choose a zip file to upload: <input type="file" name="zip_file" /></label>
<br />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Upload" />
</form>
</body>
</html>