Important! This is old code. I’ve not used it for a long time. It might still be useful. Be careful.

This snippet is a CakePHP component which can be used to force a users browser to download a specified file instead of attempting to display it. It will happily deal with any file your scripts have read access to. When provided with an absolute file location and filename for the downloaded file, it will attempt to look up an appropriate mime-type for the file, output some HTTP headers followed by the file data itself.

You are responsible for exiting after calling this method. Not exiting will result in CakePHP trying to render a page after sending the file data, causing (possibly invisible) errors. I have also removed error checking code responsible for checking the file path and download name as it is very app-specific. You will probably want to add your own.

Note: I have not tested this on a Windows-based machine. I don’t see why it shouldn’t work, but you have been told.

Usage

var $components = array(‘ForceDownload’) … $this->ForceDownload->forceDownload(’/path/to/file.php’, ‘MyPHPFile.php’); exit();

Download force_download.zip