Setup

Setup instructions

Using jQuery File Upload (UI version) on PHP websites

The provided example works out of the box and only needs one step for you to add it to your PHP based website:

1. Download the plugin archive, extract it and upload the extracted folder (you may rename it) to your server.

Visit the uploaded folder's "example" directory - you should see a file upload interface similar to the demo, allowing you to upload files to your website.

If uploading files doesn't work, make sure that the files and thumbnails directories permissions allow your server write access.

Note:
The provided PHP upload handler allows anyone to upload files. The uploaded files are also accessible for anyone to download.
The easiest way to add some kind of authentication system is to protect the example directory by adding .htaccess based password protection.

Using jQuery File Upload (UI version) on websites without PHP

1. Implement a file upload handler on your platform (Ruby, Python, Java, etc.) that handles normal form based file uploads and upload it to your server. See also the Server-side specific tutorials on the Documentation Homepage.
2. Download and extract the plugin archive.
3. Edit example/index.html and adjust the action attribute of the HTML form element to the URL of your custom file upload handler. Adjust the file input name attribute if your upload handler requires another parameter name for the file uploads.
4. Upload the jQuery-File-Upload folder to your website.
5. Extend your custom server-side upload handler to return a JSON response akin to the following output:

[{"name":"picture1.jpg","size":902604,"url":"\/\/example.org\/files\/picture1.jpg","thumbnail_url":"\/\/example.org\/thumbnails\/picture1.jpg","delete_url":"\/\/example.org\/upload-handler?file=picture1.jpg","delete_type":"DELETE"},{"name":"picture2.jpg","size":841946,"url":"\/\/example.org\/files\/picture2.jpg","thumbnail_url":"\/\/example.org\/thumbnails\/picture2.jpg","delete_url":"\/\/example.org\/upload-handler?file=picture2.jpg","delete_type":"DELETE"}]

Note that the response should always be a JSON array even if only one file is uploaded.

Visit the uploaded folder's "example" directory - you should see a file upload interface similar to the demo, allowing you to upload files to your website.

Content-Type Negotiation

The file upload plugin makes use of an Iframe Transport module for browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera, which do not yet support XMLHTTPRequest file uploads.
Iframe based uploads require a Content-type of text/plain or text/html for the JSON response - they will show an undesired download dialog if the iframe response is set to application/json.

You can make use of the Accept header to offer different content types for the file upload response. Here is the (PHP) example code snippet for the Accept content-type variation:

<?php
header('Vary: Accept');
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT']) &&
    (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/json') !== false)) {
    header('Content-type: application/json');
} else {
    header('Content-type: text/plain');
}
?>

Using only the basic version of the jQuery File Upload plugin

If you want to build your own interface, please refer to the Basic plugin guide (minimal setup guide).