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I have an Apache 2.2 running and I am forcing some files to be downloaded using this .htaccess snippet:

<Files *.*>
        ForceType application/octet-stream
        Header set Content-Disposition attachment
</Files>

All the affected files are in one subfolder, so this worked nicely so far. Unfortunately it now turns out that this sometimes causes problems (for example, jplayer doesn't like that). I now need to selectively use default behavior, or forced downloads for these files.

I imagine that it must be somehow possible to choose the behavior with an URL parameter, so that

http://example.com/files/music.mp3

would cause normal behavior (i.e. a browser that can play MP3s would do so and jplayer won't complain), and

http://example.com/files/music.mp3?download=1

would force a download. However I can't figure out how I can use ForceType selectively based on the presence of a parameter. I know it would be easily possible with some PHP, but I want to avoid that if possible.

Thanks for any help!

jlh
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2 Answers2

1

A rather efficient way to do that, would be to create another folder, called say /download/, with your htaccess snippet in it, and redirect all /download/ file requests to the /file/ folder using this added rewrite rule in the same .htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ files/$1 [L]

That way for analytics/logs purpose you can identify downloads separately with good semantics, and call your /files/ normally for html embed use, without any .htaccess performance downside for the /files/ requests, which will not be affected by the .htaccess from the /download/ folder.

hexalys
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    Awesome, thank you! This is even better, because the URLs look better without the query string. I didn't even think about using the rewrite engine for that. – jlh Apr 25 '13 at 14:20
1

A similar question has already been answered here:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/7446204/2291963

Reads in the QueryString, and will set it for whatever file extensions you decide to use.

Community
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Chris
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