Question

I have a personal project that’s been online for sometime now. I’ve been keeping a tally of downloads by doing this:

• When the user clicks the download link, it hits a PHP script that writes some information to a table.
• Once the data is written, the script returns the path to the actual file.
• The user then has the ability to save the file to their hard disk as if it was any other download.

This has worked well enough for sometime; however, it prevents users from being able to right-click > save target as... because they’ll actually just see download.php appear in the ‘File Save..’ dialog. Thus, the only way to download the project is to left-click on the link.

I’d like to improve the process so that a user can download the project using whatever method with which s/he is most comfortable. So, what are some better ways to transparently log downloads without getting in the user’s way?

For what it’s worth, the machine is a standard LAMP stack, so no .NET options here.

Answer 1

This is taken from the php-documentation, but is also possible using different script languages:

<?php // We'll be outputting a PDF header('Content-type: application/pdf');  // It will be called downloaded.pdf header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='downloaded.pdf'');  // The PDF source is in original.pdf readfile('original.pdf'); ?> 

The HTTP-Header Content-Disposition tells it to save it as a download.

Another option would be to inspect your log-files regularly, like every day using a script.