Recursively look in subdirectories for matching filename. - apache

Question

if a file is not found, i would like to recursively check in subdirectories until a file with the requested name is found and deliver that.
example:
the request is:
http://domain.com/file.txt
look recursively in subdirectories until file.txt is found, then deliver:
http://domain.com/foo/bar/file.txt
the only thing i have managed so far is the trigger when a file is not found:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

Answer 1

Take this into a loader script. First, have this rewrite in your application (vhost configuration or .htaccess file)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /loader.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
Then have a loader.php script in the root directory of your website, that would search for a file recursively and either redirect to the proper URL or load the file, get the mime tipe, set the proper headers and respond with the content of that file. Something like this:
<?php
// Do some processing here to extract the proper file name
// from $_REQUEST['q'] into a variable called $filename
// Assume we have the $filename
$it = new RecursiveDirectoryIterator(__DIR__); // Start search where loader.php is located
foreach (new RecursiveIteratorIterator($it) as $file) {
if (pathinfo($file, PATHINFO_BASENAME) == $filename) {
$returnFile = $file;
break;
}
}
// Check if the file was found
// Do a proper redirect to the 404 page here if you need more
if (empty($returnFile)) {
header ("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
die();
}
// You need to do some fancy magic here to set the proper content type
// We will return plain text for now
header("Content-Type:text/plain");
// Handle large files
set_time_limit(0);
$file = #fopen($file_path,"rb");
while(!feof($file))
{
print(#fread($file, 1024*8));
ob_flush();
flush();
}
/* EndOfScript */
And that's about it, I guess... I haven't tested this AT ALL, so there might be a lot wrong with it! Then again, you can get the main picture of how you can handle this issue!