Curl POST files and Squid

For releases we also package a PEAR package for each component. We have a channel server at http://components.ez.no that can be integrated to download each component separately, but with dependency checking. As server back-end we use Chiara_PEAR_Server, which allows us to upload each component's release with a web-form. Now that we're having more and more available components uploading them one by one is no fun anymore—even more because the Firefox developers thought to be smart and force you to use the dialog instead of pasting in the filename.

So I wrote a script not too long ago to upload all the .tgz PEAR packages through curl . That was working great for quite a few releases. Unfortunately, when I rolled our latest 2008.2beta1 release this script refused to work. I investigated a bit and saw that curl posted only the header of the request, and not the POST body. Being annoyed by that I tried older curl versions to see if those were working, but no luck. I even tried PECL 's HTTP package only in order to find out that it actually uses curl in order to do requests.

So because all of that failed, I looked a tad more at the headers that curl was posting, and found this " Expect: 100-continue " header, which can be used to test whether a web server will accept a certain request based on headers. Turns out that Squid doesn't quite support that and simply rejects the request. As we use Squid to accelerate our site, we now have to create an SSH tunnel to the web server so that we can run curl against localhost with a port forward to the web server. Not fun, but it works.