Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@maxivak
Created January 1, 2013 23:34
  • Star 23 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 8 You must be signed in to fork a gist
Star You must be signed in to star a gist
Save maxivak/4430975 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Rails. Download remote image as attachment in browser
# in controller
# for local files
send_file '/path/to/file', :type => 'image/jpeg', :disposition => 'attachment'
# for remote files
require 'open-uri'
url = 'http://someserver.com/path/../filename.jpg'
data = open(url).read
send_data data, :disposition => 'attachment', :filename=>"photo.jpg"
@Valve
Copy link

Valve commented Mar 6, 2014

Excellent, thank you.

@jmwelch
Copy link

jmwelch commented Feb 5, 2015

+1. Just to note, if you don't know what type of file you'll be remotely downloading ahead of time, just remove the .jpg extension from :filename!

@daddydanielt
Copy link

Thanks, it's very helpful to me.

@YoranBrondsema
Copy link

I wouldn't recommend using this with user-specified URL because of security issues with using open-uri. This article sums it up well.

@mikevoets
Copy link

I don't think this is a good idea, as you'll be reading all the file data into memory (in data). Depending on the file size, this becomes a problem.

@ramyasrees
Copy link

hello sir,how to get perticular url from json?
$.each(files, function(key,value){
alert(value.link)});

in my code how can i store the link value in avariable?

@oshanz
Copy link

oshanz commented Nov 6, 2019

if you are going to serve aws s3 files like this, you are gonna loose all the benefits like CDN and high availability features.
because this way you download file to the server. it become a network bottleneck.

@shahroon
Copy link

A lot of load on server's memory. Not recommended.

@sebackend
Copy link

what about the file after downloading? is it still persist on the server?

i think the file should be removed after the controller response

@vishaljangir
Copy link

thank you

@khoan
Copy link

khoan commented Mar 2, 2021

shahroon commented on 13 Nov 2019
A lot of load on server's memory. Not recommended.

maybe, pass an enum with some sensible limit?

send_data data.each(512)...

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment