Php allow user to download a file

X-Sendfile and X-Accel-Redirect both work on the same underlying concept. Instead of asking a scripting language like PHP to pull a file into memory, simply tell the web server to do an internal redirect and serve the contents of an otherwise protected file. In short, you can do away with much of the above, and reduce the solution down to just header 'X-Accel-Redirect Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Asked 10 years, 7 months ago. Active 3 years, 6 months ago. Viewed 7k times. Marc 4, 3 3 gold badges 36 36 silver badges 59 59 bronze badges. Only when you are logged in , or allow downloads for people who have looged in not you?

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Blender Blender k 48 48 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. The PHP code in the previous example will be slightly modified to download the file from the given path. The clearstatecache function is used to clear the cache that was previously stored. Two arguments are used in the readfile function.

Output After the download link of the PDF file is clicked, the following output will appear. This article provided a simple way to forcibly download any file using the PHP script, to help readers to add the download feature in their script. I am a trainer of web programming courses. I like to write article or tutorial on various IT topics. Generally, no PHP script is required to download a file with the extensions exe and zip.

If the file location of this type of file is set in the href attribute of the anchor element, then the file automatically downloads when the user clicks on the download link. These files can be downloaded forcibly in PHP using the readfile function that does not download automatically. Many developers forget to send the code or the Accept-Ranges. Yet others forget that when you send a range, the Content-Length must match the length of the range rather than the size of the whole file.

You can output the file using the method described above, skipping until the start of the range and delivering the length of the range. I did my best to provide only accurate information. It would be truly sad for me if an article about avoiding common PHP errors contained errors itself.

Regardless, my point stands: PHP makes it easy to hack together code that appears to be working, but developers should read and adhere to the official specifications. Great post. Im having issues though. Im trying to get the remote files with using headers but it kills the ability for the user to be able to stream the podcast.

BTW I found this post that was exactly what i needed and works great! It sends a bogus error if the range is not accepted and sends the full file size as the content length rather than just the length of the range. Now, browsers are probably coded to cope with all sorts of errors, but we should strive to write correct code, not just working code. This method works for now and I plane to develop a better functioning version of this.

The regular expression in the above example line no-8 will simply not allow those files whose name starts or ends with a dot character. Please check out the tutorial on regular expressions to learn the regular expressions in details. Is this website helpful to you?

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