File Force

When a site visitor requests a file, File Force can force the user's web browser to download the file to disk instead of displaying it in the browser window.

Web browsers today are pre-configured to display various types of media when accessed directly, such as text files, media (image, video and audio) files, PDF documents, and Flash movies. After this happens, it's typically possible for a visitor to save the file to their hard drive using their browser's File menu and/or the item's contextual menu ("right-clicking"); however, novice computer users may not be aware of this, or perhaps you would prefer that visitors view the media in a non-browser application — or maybe you just want to make sure that visitors will attain a copy of the file for themselves so they don't have to re-visit your site to access it again. File Force solves this problem by offering files with certain HTTP headers which cause the web browser to download the file to the user's disk instead of displaying it in a browser window.

Installation & Configuration

Install File Force as you would any other module.

Now, let's get hypothetical. Let's say you have your band's latest, greatest song in the file song.mp3 and you want to share it with the world, but you want people to download it instead of just playing it in their browser — and that's why you've installed File Force.

Making sure folks download the file is easy. Let's say the standard path for your band's MP3 was sites/default/files/song.mp3. To make File Force kick into action, all you've got to do is to link folks to that path with download/ prepended to it: download/sites/default/files/song.mp3. Or, in terms of absolute URLs, http://example.com/download/sites/default/files/song.mp3

There's a teensy problem that goes along with this, though; in your links to files, you need to account for whether your site has Clean URLs enabled. If not, you need to add a ?q= particle to the beginning of the path; otherwise, the web server is going to look for an actual file at that path and show a 404 error when it doesn't find one. We need to make sure the request is handled by Drupal. So, to link to "song.mp3":

Clean URLs enabled: http://example.com/download/sites/default/files/song.mp3

Clean URLs disabled: http://example.com/?q=download/sites/default/files/song.mp3

Get the picture? Note that when linking to Drupal pages in your Drupal content, my Pathologic module can simplify things greatly, especially when it comes to Clean URL issues as illustrated above (if you have Pathologic installed but Clean URLs disabled, you could link to the Clean URLs path and Pathologic will "correct" it for you).

Caveats

Note that installing File Force does not mean that visitors will no longer be able to view files in their browser window at all. The files will still be accessible at their initial paths as mentioned in the example above. Only when you use the "download/" prefix does File Force kick into action. This also means that the default file listings created by the Upload module will not provide links to the File Force path, instead linking directly to the file (which will be opened in a browser window). Future versions of File Force may address this, but for now, you should either upload your files to the files directory directly, bypassing the Upload module, or configure the Upload module to not show listings of attached files when nodes are viewed, and then link to the file using the File Force path in the node's content.

Please note that File Force offers an easy solution to the problem of forcing visitors to download requested files, but it (along with any other solution which requires a scripting language) is not recommended for high-traffic sites and/or sites that need to offer rather large files. Solutions which rely solely on the configuration of the web server should be implemented instead.

Also note that some web browsers may ignore the headers that File Force sends and display the content anyway, either due to a bug or just because it's obnoxious. Unfortunately, my own browser of choice, OmniWeb, has such a bug. If it appears that File Force isn't working on your site, give it a try in a different web browser just to make sure the problem doesn't lie with your primary browser.

Questions? Suggestions? Need help?

Please open an issue on File Force's issue queue or contact the author and I'll get back to you soon. Thanks for trying File Force!