CODEWITHSUNDEEP
php
user2529964
user2529964

Reputation: 31

How to start a download using php

I have spent a couple of day's looking for a solution to start a download using php, of course I did find loads of solutions. Unfortunately none of them worked for me. For whatever reason when I test it and try to start the download, it does show the file I want but when I download it regardless of what kind of file it was meant to download it would download as a text file with my website's HTML within it.

Here is an example of one of the many examples I have tried:

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"" . basename($File) . "\"");
header("Content-Type: application/force-download");
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($File));
header("Connection: close");

Upvotes: 2

Views: 99

Answers (2)

Hamish
Hamish

Reputation: 23316

Rather than trying to serve files with PHP, hand it off to the server with x-sendfile headers. Performance is a lot better (especially for large files) and the server will handle the necessary response headers.

There is an Apache mod and it's built into Lighttpd and Nginx (with a slightly different name).

Upvotes: 1

zkanoca
zkanoca

Reputation: 9918

Can you try this please? You need readfile() function.

<?php
    header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
    header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
    header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='.basename($file));
    header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
    header('Expires: 0');
    header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate');
    header('Pragma: public');
    header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($file));
    ob_clean();
    flush();
    readfile($file);
    exit;
?>

Upvotes: 3

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