How to Automatically Start a Download in PHP

How to Automatically Start a Download in PHP?

Send the following headers before outputting the file:

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"" . basename($File) . "\"");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($File));
header("Connection: close");

@grom: Interesting about the 'application/octet-stream' MIME type. I wasn't aware of that, have always just used 'application/force-download' :)

How to force a file to download in PHP

If you want to force a download, you can use something like the following:

<?php
    // Fetch the file info.
    $filePath = '/path/to/file/on/disk.jpg';

    if(file_exists($filePath)) {
        $fileName = basename($filePath);
        $fileSize = filesize($filePath);

        // Output headers.
        header("Cache-Control: private");
        header("Content-Type: application/stream");
        header("Content-Length: ".$fileSize);
        header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$fileName);

        // Output file.
        readfile ($filePath);                   
        exit();
    }
    else {
        die('The provided file path is not valid.');
    }
?>

If you simply link to this script using a normal link the file will be downloaded.

Incidentally, the code snippet above needs to be executed at the start of a page (before any headers or HTML output had occurred.) Also take care if you decide to create a function based around this for downloading arbitrary files - you'll need to ensure that you prevent directory traversal (realpath is handy), only permit downloads from within a defined area, etc. if you're accepting input from a $_GET or $_POST.

PHP automatically download file

        <?php
    // set url "http://
           curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "<your url>"); 

          //return the transfer as a string 
         curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 

         // $output contains the output string 
         $output = curl_exec($ch); 

         // close curl resource to free up system resources 
          curl_close($ch); 

    file_put_contents($output,"<file>";
    ?>

Start download automatically when a user navigates to another page

Redirect to a page which emits the following headers:

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename");
header("Content-Length: $length");

See this post about the restrictions on $filename.

edit in response to andr's answer, the php equivalent of redirect-after-x-seconds would be:

header("Refresh: 2; url=start_download.php");

(although you should officially specify a complete URL, I think) where start_download.php would contain the two lines above.

Downloading zip file automatically via php code

u need to add header for the client about file downloading. just see the manual example: http://php.net/manual/en/function.header.php#example-5315

<?php
    $file = getcwd() . '/read.zip';
    // http headers for zip downloads
    header("Pragma: public");
    header("Expires: 0");
    header("Cache-Control: public");
    header("Content-Description: File Transfer");
    header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
    header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"read.zip\"");
    header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
    header("Content-Length: ".filesize($file));
    ob_end_flush();
    @readfile($file);

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