Do you know situations when you work somewhere with a very slow internet connection on a client website with no direct access to the server itself via SSH, but you quickly need a tool like phpMyAdmin or MySQLDumper for some database work? Downloading these tools manually and upload them over a slow FTP/FTPS connection to the destination server can take a lot of time.

The AppLoader is just a little helper-script — written in PHP — which allows you to download database tools or even other tools (if you add them to the script) from the client webspace itself and automatically extract them into a working-directory. This will save you the whole download/upload time, and you can get back to your work much faster. For this script we really went for simplicity: Just create an empty folder, give it write permission and upload the one single PHP file from this package. No fancy stuff that will again cost you a lot of upload time in regions with slow connection speeds and no possibility to download stuff directly on the remote machine/webspace.

Once uploaded you can access the AppLoader from your browser. The script will then create a working-directory within its own folder where the tools will be downloaded and extracted into. By default, you have the possibility to directly download and install phpMyAdmin or MySQLDumper. But you can add own tools into the script code if necessary.

Once the tool downloaded and extracted the files you can access them in the working-directory and use them as usual. AppLoader will detect that the tool is installed and will also provide you a handy link from its overview page.

• Upload the folder AppLoader with its included index.php file to the destination webspace

• Give the folder AppLoader write permissions (if you want you can also rename the folder)

• Open the AppLoader folder with the index.php in your browser like https://example.com/AppLoader/

• If your webspace supports the tool, it will create a working-directory within its own folder automatically and you will see the options to download & install the DB tools with just one click (like a little package manager if you will)

• ATTENTION: You should always secure the directory with AppLoader in it from public access and give the folder a cryptical name in the first place. If you finished downloading the tools you need, you can also delete the index.php file again from your webspace if you want.

Check out our little FAQ here, maybe we already got your question covered!

• PHP >= 5.6
• ZipArchive Support
• curl Support
• PHP memory_limit > 16M
• PHP timeout > 20sec (ZIP extraction could take a moment to process)

Normally most webspaces these days should fulfill these requirements. If not, chances are good that you would also not be able to use the downloadable database tools either. ;)

Copyright CBACK® Software under the MIT License.

Enjoy!