force browser to download a file instead viewing it

Question

On my web I want to have two buttons - first Download that should download a pdf to the user\'s computer and another View that opens pdf in a new t

Answer 1

In the end, as I use nginx, I decided to solve this at http-server level:

location /media  {
    alias /srv/www/novacek/media/;
}

location /download/media {
    alias /srv/www/novacek/media/;
    add_header Content-Disposition "attachment";
}

Answer 2

You need to force file download in your server-side script:

Here is a PHP example:

$file = "path/to/my-file.pdf";

header("Cache-Control: public");
header("Content-Description: File Transfer");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$file");
header("Content-Type: application/pdf");
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");