How to make the pdf files downloadable?

Question

I am able to display file with url: For example

echo '<a href="'.$file_url.'" target="_blank">'.$path_parts['basename'].'</a>';

How can I make this file downloadable? In case of pdf files, it is not downloading and opening in new tab as i have added target.

Answer 1

If you want to Force download PDF files. if your server is Apache

put this line in your .htaccess file.

AddType application/octet-stream .pdf

If there is any issues with browser try this

SetEnvIf Request_URI "\.pdf$" requested_pdf=pdf
Header add Content-Disposition "attachment" env=requested_pdf

If its NGINX

location ~* /orig/(.+\.jpg)$ {
    internal;
    add_header Content-disposition "attachment; filename=$1";
}

Answer 2

In addition to doing it from apache's side via the httpd.conf or .htaccess with above answer ... You can do this with a module as well:

<?php
function mymodule_mimetype_override_file_mimetype_mapping_alter(&$mapping) {  
  $new_mime_type = 'application/octet-stream'; //already in mimetypes so below array addition wont happen, but put here in case you want to add your own type

  if ( !in_array($new_mime_type, $mapping['mimetypes'])) {
    $mapping['mimetypes'][] = $new_mime_type; //mapping['mimetypes']['octetstream']
  }
  $index = array_search($new_mime_type, $mapping['mimetypes']);
  $mapping['extensions']['pdf'] = 15; //manually setting for now, could have used $index; //15 is octet-stream, 18 is pdf
}

//also added this for my HTTPS site since IE8 couldnt download/display any files if it doesn't have certain cache headers for ssl websites ... heh, booooooo
function mymodule_override_file_download($filepath) {
  header("Cache-Control: private, must-revalidate"); //may have to set Pragma too but not in my case
}