How to force download for remote file in Symfony2? - php

Question

My Controller looks like this:
public function downloadAction($filename) {
// Adding url to filename
$path = $this->container->getParameter('remotepath').$filename;
// Checking if file exists
$ch = curl_init($path);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_exec($ch);
$code = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);
if ($code == 200) {
// Get the file
$file = file_get_contents($path);
// Generate Response
$response = new Response();
$d = $response->headers->makeDisposition(ResponseHeaderBag::DISPOSITION_ATTACHMENT, $filename);
$response->headers->set('Content-Disposition', $d);
$response->setContent($file);
} else {
$response = new Response();
$response->setContent('File not found. ('.$filename.')');
$response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'text/html');
$response->setStatusCode(404);
}
return $response;
}
What I am trying to accomplish is to get a remote file (image, pdf, ...) and force a download for this file.
But for some reason Symfony is always putting out the header and the file contents as plain text (-> gibberish) in the browser.
I can't find the reason why!
Edit:
I altered the code so, that I only create an empty Response() and return it for the controller. On calling the downloadAction with a filename I get the header contents written into the browser window.
So I checked the headers with Firebug and it seems like Symfony responds with normal headers and prints the headers I set to the content. Any suggestions on what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

This can be done with RedirectResponse by doing the following in your controller method.
return new RedirectResponse($yourRemoteDownloadUrl);
In this example $yourRemoteDownloadUrl is a PDF file which is living in a Amazon S3 bucket.
Works in Symfony 2 and 3.