Automatically import CSV file and upload to database

should be pretty straight forward depending on the csv file

some csv files have quotes around text "", some don't some have , comma inside the quoted field etc

depending on you level of php skills this should be reasonably easy

you can get a modified timestamp from the file to see if it is new

http://nz.php.net/manual/en/function.lstat.php

open the file and import the data

http://php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php

insert into the database

http://nz.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-query.php

If the CSV is difficult to parse with fgetcsv the you could try something like PHPExcel project which has csv reading capabilities

http://phpexcel.codeplex.com

You can just make a script which reads csv file using fread function of php, extract each row and format in an array to insert it into database.

$fileTemp = "path-of-the-file.csv";
$fp = fopen($fileTemp,'r');
$datas = array()
while (($data = fgetcsv($fp)) !== FALSE)
{
     $data['productName'] = trim($data[0]);
     $data['spec'] = trim($data[1]);
     $data['imageLocation'] = trim($data[2]);
     $datas[] = $data;
}

Now you have prepared array $datas which you can insert into database with iterations.

All you need is:

• Store last file's mtime somewhere (let's say, for simplicity, in another file)
• script that runs every X minutes by cron

In this script you simply mtime of the csv file with stored value. If mtime differs, you run SQL query that looks like this:

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '/var/www/tmp/file.csv' REPLACE INTO TABLE mytable COLUMNS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n'

Optionally, you can just touch your file to know when you've performed last data load. If the scv's file mtime is greate than your "helper" file, you should touch it and perform the query.

Documentation on LOAD DATA INFILE SQL statement is here

Of course there is a room for queries errors, but I hope you will handle it (you just need to be sure data loaded properly and only in this case touch file or write new mtime).

have you had a look at fgetcsv? You will probably have to set up a cron job to check for a new file at regular intervals.