So I started writing a netboot server for floor. I decided to start writing the web interface first, and learn myself some mason, web perl, and database-y things. Also found some things out about the process that were a little undocumented/misdocumented (now a word).

The biggest issue (so far) was file uploads. So here's a quick tutorial on how to do file uploads with perl, with mason.

In index.html (or wherever your form HTML code lives):

<form method="post" action="upload.mas" enctype="multipart/form-data">
  <input type="file" name="file_name" /><br />
  <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

In upload.mas:

<%init>
    use Apache2::Upload;

    # $r is an Apache2::RequestRec, not an Apache2::Request like some places say it is
    my $req = Apache2::Request->new($r);

    # file_name refers to the form name you had in your HTML
    my $upload = $req->upload('file_name');

    my $fh = $upload->fh;
    open OUTFILE, ">$where_ever_you_wanna_save_the)file";

    binmode $fh;
    binmode OUTFILE;

    print OUTFILE $line foreach my $line (<$fh>);
    close OUTFILE;
    close $fh;
</%init>

In your httpd.conf:

APREQ2_READLIMIT 2G # Sets the max size of your user's uploads to 2GB

I intentionally skipped over error handling code and all of the httpd.conf config for the sake of brevity (I did say brief tutorial). Since I need to allow for larger file sizes than Apache does by default (64MB), I spent quite some time looking for that Apache directive.

Hopefully this saves someone some time.