I was working for a Drupal website which i wanted to increase its maximum file upload size. This value is determined by the php.ini configuration file.

Unfortunately, the server hosting does not provide the SSH access so i can’t edit the php.ini. Therefore i have to let Drupal override the php.ini settings. There is 2 ways for Drupal to override the php.ini settings.

• <drupal_root>/sites/default/settings.php
• <drupal_root>/.htaccess

Let’s take a look on the settings.php first.

...
/**
 * PHP settings:
 *
 * To see what PHP settings are possible, including whether they can
 * be set at runtime (ie., when ini_set() occurs), read the PHP
 * documentation at http://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.php#ini.list
 * and take a look at the .htaccess file to see which non-runtime
 * settings are used there. Settings defined here should not be
 * duplicated there so as to avoid conflict issues.
 */
ini_set('arg_separator.output',     '&');
ini_set('magic_quotes_runtime',     0);
ini_set('magic_quotes_sybase',      0);
ini_set('session.cache_expire',     200000);
ini_set('session.cache_limiter',    'none');
ini_set('session.cookie_lifetime',  2000000);
ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime',   200000);
ini_set('session.save_handler',     'user');
ini_set('session.use_cookies',      1);
ini_set('session.use_only_cookies', 1);
ini_set('session.use_trans_sid',    0);
ini_set('url_rewriter.tags',        '');
...

You can make use of the ini_set() function to change the php.ini settings. But according the List of php.ini directives, upload_max_filesize could not be set through ini_set().

Therefore, i have to change the upload_max_filesize value by the second approach which is editing the .htaccess file. Open the <drupal_root>/.htaccess and add the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size as follow.

...
# PHP 5, Apache 1 and 2.
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
  php_value magic_quotes_gpc                0
  php_value register_globals                0
  php_value session.auto_start              0
  php_value mbstring.http_input             pass
  php_value mbstring.http_output            pass
  php_value mbstring.encoding_translation   0
  # Add you own configuration here
  php_value upload_max_filesize             10M
  php_value post_max_size                   10M
</IfModule>
...

The .htaccess will take effect immediately. Now the file upload size limit could be set to 10M.

Done =)

Reference:

• Stack Overflow – Changing upload_max_filesize on PHP
• PHP – ini_set()
• PHP – List of php.ini directives