Question

I’m trying to create a download so that a user clicks on “down” it downloads a certain file from their account to their computer, I’m currently using this:

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . basename("users/$username/$file_folder/$file_name"));
header("Content-Type:" .$file_type);
header("Content-Description: File Transfer");
header("Cache-control: private");
header("Connection: close");
header("Content-Length: ".$file_size);

The problem is, the file is downloading, but it’s just empty, there is no content in the file

The code before this is just an if() and a while loop with database records.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The file is empty, because you never output the file. These header calls are just the header, you still need a body for a file to be correctly downloaded. You can use file_get_contents to echo the file contents.

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . basename("users/$username/$file_folder/$file_name"));
header("Content-Type:" .$file_type);
header("Content-Description: File Transfer");
header("Cache-control: private");
header("Connection: close");
header("Content-Length: ".$file_size);

// echo the file, this will make the download work
echo file_get_contents("users/$username/$file_folder/$file_name");