how to download file in react js

Question

I receive file url as response from api. when user clicks on download button, the file should be downloaded without opening file preview in a new tab. How to achieve this in react js?

Solution 1

Triggering browser download from the frontend is not reliable.

What you should do is, create an endpoint on a server that when called, responds with the correct response headers, thus triggering the browser download.

Frontend code can only do so much. The 'download' attribute for example, might just open the file in a new tab depending on the browser and the type of the file.

The response headers you need to look at are Content-Type and Content-Disposition. You should check this answer for a more detailed explanation on those headers.

Solution 2

This is not related to React. However, you can use the download attribute on the anchor <a> element to tell the browser to download the file.

<a href='/somefile.txt' download>Click to download</a>

This is not supported on all browsers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a

Solution 3

If you are using React Router, use this:

<Link to="/files/myfile.pdf" target="_blank" download>Download</Link>

Where /files/myfile.pdf is inside your public folder.

Solution 4

tldr; fetch the file from the url, store it as a local Blob, inject a link element into the DOM, and click it to download the Blob

I had a PDF file that was stored in S3 behind a Cloudfront URL. I wanted the user to be able to click a button and immediately initiate a download without popping open a new tab with a PDF preview. Generally, if a file is hosted at a URL that has a different domain that the site the user is currently on, immediate downloads are blocked by many browsers for user security reasons. If you use this solution, do not initiate the file download unless a user clicks on a button to intentionally download.

In order to get by this, I needed to fetch the file from the URL getting around any CORS policies to save a local Blob that would then be the source of the downloaded file. In the code below, make sure you swap in your own fileURL, Content-Type, and FileName.

fetch('https://cors-anywhere.herokuapp.com/' + fileURL, {
    method: 'GET',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/pdf',
    },
  })
  .then((response) => response.blob())
  .then((blob) => {
    // Create blob link to download
    const url = window.URL.createObjectURL(
      new Blob([blob]),
    );
    const link = document.createElement('a');
    link.href = url;
    link.setAttribute(
      'download',
      `FileName.pdf`,
    );

    // Append to html link element page
    document.body.appendChild(link);

    // Start download
    link.click();

    // Clean up and remove the link
    link.parentNode.removeChild(link);
  });

This solution references solutions to getting a blob from a URL and using a CORS proxy.

Update As of January 31st, 2021, the cors-anywhere demo hosted on Heroku servers will only allow limited use for testing purposes and cannot be used for production applications. You will have to host your own cors-anywhere server by following cors-anywhere or cors-server.

Solution 5

browsers are smart enough to detect the link and downloading it directly when clicking on an anchor tag without using the download attribute.

after getting your file link from the api, just use plain javascript by creating anchor tag and delete it after clicking on it dynamically immediately on the fly.

const link = document.createElement('a');
link.href = `your_link.pdf`;
document.body.appendChild(link);
link.click();
document.body.removeChild(link);

View more solutions

Comments

[Sameer Thite]

Anchor tag opens image in same browser tab (preview of image) and then we need to manually save the image. I am trying to achieve automatic download on button click, without opening file preview

[lipp]

Refer to this for more details: stackoverflow.com/questions/2408146/…

[1020rpz]

What you should do is, create an endpoint that when called, will provide the correct response headers, thus triggering the browser download.... What are those header and how does specifics headers can trigger browser download ? thanks

[Rohan Kumar]

I try for zip file, the file downloads, and never unzips properly. Someone might know the reason for it? Btw, I find a workaround: stackoverflow.com/a/62855917/7622204

[Jake]

Except that browser will open a PDF, and I want it to download. Not open.

[Jake]

This is kind of a cool library. It still opened PDFs in a new tab unfortunately though. It makes opening the file on the fly a really clean process though.

[Pankaj]

Its also working with react and node/HAPI. I have added below link.href = your_link.pdf; link.download = yourFileName; Thanks a lot.

[Divyesh Kanzariya]

It will open pdf in new tab while using fileSaver

[user]

download observes the same-origin-policy FYI

[Santhosh]

this works well, asks for save as, which is what i was looking for

[hoanghuychh]

I can't open file after download, File error : "The file (nameFile) could not be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognize." Did I miss anything?

[Admin]

@DivyeshKanzariya how can you resolve this question?

[Nils Knappmeier]

Be aware that if the page is not reloaded in your app, the blob passed to "URL.createObjectURL" will remain in memory until you call URL.revokeObjectUrl. For a long-running app, this may lead to wasted memory and perfomance issues.

[fullStackChris]

Update for 2021: the download property is supported in 95% of browsers: caniuse.com/download so... 🤷‍♂️

[fatemeh kazemi]

I was able to add an epub file in the same way

[Jackyef]

Hey, sorry for the late reply. The headers in question are Content-Type and Content-Disposition.

[Mayank-Dolphin]

It's working for me. Thank you for this solution.

[Alex Aung]

this one is good but is there a way to change label to icon?