File uploads without $_FILES

Is it possible in PHP to configure it to somehow not save files to disk at all? As a matter of fact, the best thing would be to get the sc开发者_StackOverflowript going before even reading the entire POST body. (Keeping my hopes high ;))

You can turn off file uploads via a configuration setting in PHP.

http://php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.file-uploads

PHP needs a place to temporarily store the files content for you to be able to interact with it through PHP - although, you don't have to do anything else other then access the temporary file to get the data:

$content = file_get_contents($_FILES["user_file"]["tmp_name"]);

From here on you can manipulate with the files content without having to move the uploaded file to another location before accessing it.

You can use HTTP PUT requests to directly upload a file. PHP will not handle the upload directly (e.g. set it up in $_FILES). Instead, you have to read the raw bytes from the php://input pseudo-url and from there can do whatever you want.

There's some details and examples here.