$file->download($filename = null)

• $filename (string)
  Filename after download

Example

The download method makes most sense with a custom route. You could easily build a nice download archive with a beautiful URL that way.

Let's assume you build a software and you want to provide a download link for the latest version at: http://yoursoftware.com/downloads/latest

There is a /content/downloads folder, which contains the text file for the downloads page together with all releases of your software:

/content/downloads
/content/downloads/downloads.txt
/content/downloads/yoursoftware-1.0.zip
/content/downloads/yoursoftware-1.1.zip
/content/downloads/yoursoftware-1.2.zip

There's no latest subpage and thus the URL http://yoursoftware.com/downloads/latest does not really exist. We will build that with the router:

/site/config/config.php

c::set('routes', array(
  array(
    'pattern' => 'downloads/latest',
    'action'  => function() {

      page('downloads')
        ->files()
        ->filterBy('extension', 'zip')
        ->last()
        ->download();

    }
  )
));

The code above is very easy to explain. We are adding a new route for the URL http://yoursoftware.com/downloads/latest. Route patterns are always relative to the base URL of your site. In the action callback we simply fetch the downloads page, go through all the files and filter out those with the zip extension, take the last one of them and call the download method.

This will take care of sending the appropriate headers and echoing the content of the zip file to start the download in the browser.

This could easily be extended with a simple download counter for example to make it even more useful.