Home/ Questions/Q 581239
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-13T14:33:27+00:00

Lets assume I have a file on a CDN (Cloud Files from Rackspace) and

  • 0

Lets assume I have a file on a CDN (Cloud Files from Rackspace) and a static html page with a link to that file. Is there any way I can force download this file (to prevent it from opening in the browser — for mp3s for example)?

We could make our server read the file and set the corresponding header to:

header("Content-Type: application/force-download")

but we have about 5 million downloads per month so we would rather let the CDN take care of that.

Any ideas?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There’s no way to do this in HTML or JavaScript. There is now! (Ish. See @BruceAldrige’s answer below.)

    The HTTP Content-Disposition header is what tells browsers to download the files, and that’s sent by the server. You have to configure the CDN to send that header with whichever files you want to browser to download instead of display.

    Unhelpfully, I’m entirely unfamiliar with Rackspace’s Cloud Files service, so I don’t know if they allow this, nor how to do it. Just found a page from December 2009 that suggests not thought, sadly:

    Cloud Files cannot serve a file with the ‘Content-Disposition: attachment’ HTTP header. Therefore, a download link that would work perfectly in any other service may result in the browser rendering the file directly. This was confirmed by Rackspace engineers. 🙁

    http://drupal.org/node/656714

    I know that you can with Amazon’s CloudFront service, as it’s backed by S3 (see e.g. http://blog.cloudberrylab.com/2009/06/how-to-set-custom-http-headers-for.html)

    • 0