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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T20:55:57+00:00

I have Drupal website and my users can no longer download files. (docx, xlsx,

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I have Drupal website and my users can no longer download files. (docx, xlsx, etc). In firefox only, when the user clicks a link to download a file the page displays garbage code.

I read elsewhere the solution is to add the following, but it didn’t work. Instead, the user is prompted with a dummy download for the application type each time the page reloads.

drupal_set_header(‘Content-type: application/octet-stream; charset=utf-8’);

I have a simple module which has a page that spits out the links to the files. In this module I added the above to the hook_init() function.

Screenshot of the garbage code

I’ve never encountered this problem before, and I’m not sure why it started. Any help would of course be greatly appreciated. If I find a solution before someone replies with the answer I’ll post it here for future reference.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This happens because MIME types are not set correctly.
    You can either force Drupal to set the content-type header to appropriate MIME type, or set it at the server side.

    I’d recommend you to do it in the .htaccess file in your files folder (sites/default/files by default)

    Just put the below code in the .htaccess file (or you can create a new .htaccess file if it’s not there). 

    AddType  application/octet-stream  .doc .xls .pdf

    Note that hook_init() gets fired at every normal page request. Never do this in this hook or you will end up facing many problems.

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