We all know uploading things via ftp like Squirrel Mail or phpMyAdmin, or any application that has 100′s of small files takes a long time. This is mainly due to the overhead in the commands that have to be preformed to upload each file individually.

The first thing we need to do is to package all of our files into a single large file, this will allow us to massively reduce overhead, since there is only ever one send file command sent. How we do this, is simply add all the files (and the root directory if required) into a zip, so that when they are extracted to the directory on the server, they will appear on the server correctly.

Once we have zipped all of our files up, how do we then expect to be able to unzip them? We need a small bootstrap script (example below) to extract them to the server, which yes, is a second file that is small, but beats having to upload those over few 100 files.

$zip = new ZipArchive();
$r = $zip->open("myzip.zip");
if($r == TRUE) {
  $zip->extractTo("./");
}
$zip->close();

If you now upload and run your bootstrap script, you will notice (if you have the zip extension loaded in PHP) that your zip file has been extracted on the server, and was done a vast amount quicker than it would have taken to upload the individual files.

$package = "myadmin.zip";

$c = file_get_contents($package);

$content = base64_encode($c);
$bcontent = "";

for($i=0; $i<strlen($content); $i+=1024) {
  $c = substr($content, $i, 1024);
  $bcontent .= "\$content .= \"{$c}\";\r\n";
}

$f = fopen("installer.php", "w+");
if($f) {
  fwrite($f, "<?php\r\n");
  fwrite($f, "\$content = \"\";\r\n");
  fwrite($f, $bcontent);
  fwrite($f, "file_put_contents('{$package}', base64_decode(\$content));\r\n");
  fwrite($f, "\$zip = new ZipArchive();\r\n");
  fwrite($f, "\$zip->open('{$package}');\r\n");
  fwrite($f, "\$zip->extractTo('./');\r\n");
  fwrite($f, "\$zip->close();\r\n");
  fwrite($f, "?" . ">");
  fclose($f);
}