node express content-disposition

Question

I want to force the browser to download a file from an external storage, given an url. I implemented this express controller post action:

var download = function(req, res) {
    request(req.body.url).on('response', function(response) {
        res.set({
            'Content-Disposition': 'attachment; filename=' + req.body.filename,
            'Content-Type': response.headers['content-type']
        });
    })
    .pipe(res);
};

I don't know why the browser always receive a "inline" instead of "attachment", avoiding me to download the file.

In this case I use express and request, the server is hosted on Heroku and the server that hosts files is FilePicker.

Assured

FWIW, your code will do the wrong thing in case the filename contains whitespace, certain delimiters, or non-ASCII characters. See RFC 6266. – Lakenyalaker

Answer 1

I'm searching around for the very same thing. Express' documentation shows a very simple helper method right out of the box:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

app.get('/download', function(req, res) {
  res.download('/path/to/your_file.pdf');
});

Slumberland