Force File Download in NGINX & Apache

This week I encountered a customer who was struggling to find the proper code that would force the download of  PDF and .txt files on his WordPress site. The reason for the struggle was based in the fact that he was using code that was designed to work with Apache in the .htaccess file.

However, his WordPress site was running on a server that used NGINX before passing requests to Apache. Because of this, the code in the .htaccess was not working to force his files to download. So what is the proper code to use?

I will start off by showing you the code that does work when running just plain Apache. The following code snippet would need to be placed in your .htaccess file. This will force all PDF files to download on your site:

  ForceType application/octet-stream
  Header set Content-Disposition attachment

The mention of ‘pdf’ can be changed to ‘txt’ in order to do the same for txt files as well as any other file type such as mp3. Now, if like my customer, you are running NGINX, you would want to use the following rewrite rule:

location ~* (.*\.pdf) {
    types { application/octet-stream .pdf; }
    default_type application/octet-stream;
}

Again, replace ‘pdf’ with any other type of file that you would like to force download such as txt, mp3, etc.

Keep in mind that some of you may not have access to input rewrite rules into the NGINX configuration. You may have to contact your host directly in order for them to apply the rule.

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