Make temporary Files downloadable from Website

Question

On a webservice I'm developing, a user should be able to download his data in a HTML file. This file contains everything (including images as base64).

Now to make the user download this, I would have to create the file and save it on my webserver. Afterwards, I'd have to delete it using a cronjob, because I can't figure out when the download is complete.

Is there another way? Would it be possible to download a file to the user which does not physically exist on my webserver, but gets somehow created temporarily?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

As far as the WWW is concerned, there is no such thing as a file. There are just HTTP resources.

The server might get the data from a file, it might not.

Just output the data for the file from your PHP program. (ie by putting it outside <?php and ?> or using echo or any other technique that causes PHP to output something).

You need to make sure you use the right Content-Type header, but since you are using HTML, that is text/html which is the default.

You can add a Content-Disposition header if you want the user to be prompted to save their download somewhere instead of rendering the downloaded HTML in the browser window.

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='foo.html'");

Answer 2

<?php
// We'll be outputting a PDF
header('Content-type: application/pdf');

// It will be called downloaded.pdf
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="downloaded.pdf"');

// The PDF source is in original.pdf
readfile('original.pdf');
?>

From: http://php.net/manual/en/function.header.php