Question

Is it possible to download a file from my server directly to a user’s hard drive? when I try to download a CSS file, my browser just opens the css file in a new browser (almost like Microsoft Word would). I want the user to have the actual css file though.

Code

<a href="Stylesheets/custom.css" rel="external">Download This File</a>

Answer 1

If you want to force a download prompt, the simplest way to do it is to use some kind of server-side scripting language to modify the headers so they include Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="file.ext". This is very easy in PHP, but it really depends on what languages/facilities your server has available.

There are things you can do to the server configuration itself to force this as well – how you do it depends on the server you are running.

If you wanted to do it in PHP, here is a short example:

getcss.php (placed in the same directory as the HTML file with the link in it)

<?php

  if (!isset($_GET['file']) || !file_exists($_GET['file'])) {
    header('HTTP/1.1 404 File Not Found');
    exit;
  }

  header('Content-Type: text/css');
  header('Content-Length: '.filesize($_GET['file']));
  header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.basename($_GET['file']).'"');
  readfile($_GET['file']);
  exit;

?>

Then your link would be:

<a href="getcss.php?file=Stylesheets/custom.css">Download This File</a>