Johnny Matthews | How to increase PHPs upload size

So, for some reason PHP’s default upload size is only 2MB. This might have been large enough for most files way back in the day, but these days it’s barely enough to move a .doc file around. Here’s how to change it to whatever you like. This was written on 7th of August 2017.

Use the Quick Reference steps if you already know what you’re doing, and just need to copy the commands.

Prerequsites

Steps

  1. Firstly you need to SSH into your server.
  2. You need to find out where you php.ini file is. Doing this via the commandline can be misleading (php --ini only shows you which php.ini file is being used by the command line interface), so we’re going use your servers web server to tell us.
    • cd to your web servers root (probably /var/www/html).
    • Run echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > info.php
  3. Open your web browers and go to http://YOUR_SERVER_ADDRESS/info.php, obviously inputting your servers address in the url.
  4. You should see a page with your php details. Look for where it says Configuration File (php.ini Path). It should be on the fourth row from the top. Copy that path.
  5. Back in your server, cd to that path you just copied.
  6. Open a file called php.ini in that directory.
  7. Find where it says upload_max_filesize = and change the value to 2048M.
  8. Still in the same file, find where it says post_max_size = and change the value to 2048M.
  9. Save and exit the file.
  10. Run sudo service apache2 restart.
  11. Exit your server.
  12. That’s it, you’re done.

You should now be able to upload files of up to 2GB into your server.

Quick Reference Steps

  1. vim /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini
  2. Search for upload_max_filesize, change to required value.
  3. Search for post_max_size, change to require value (=< than upload_max_filesize)
  4. sudo service apapche2 restart