Download files using url in javascript

July 22, 2022

I have multiple url’s, pointing to different files. I want to be able to download them just by using the url string automatically with Javascript code, instead of manually going to the link and downloading them.

I have searched a lot of other answers on stackoverflow, few suggest creating an anchor tag in document body, but I am doing everything on backend not creating an index.html

edit: I am using next where for an api end point I am getting post requests, each which contains URL for a file which I have to download.

This is how I expect my POST request to come:

I want to be able to do something like this (in nextjs):

export default async function handler (req, res) {
    if(req.method === "POST") {
       let path = "./downloads/file"
       await download(req.body.url, path)
    }
}

Is the download function possible, if so please help me with the implementation or provide any helpful packages to do the same.

>Solution :

You can HTTP client’s like Axios. It makes it easy to send async HTTP requests to REST endpoints and perform CRUD operations fairly easily, without you having write a lot of code.

You can refer to the snippet below that I have used in my previous projects for file downloads. I guess this is what you are looking for:

const fs = require('fs')  
const Path = require('path')  
const axios = require('axios')
const crypto = require('crypto')

async function downloadFile(url) {
    const uuid = crypto.randomUUID()

    const path = Path.resolve("./utils", "uploads", uuid)
    const writer = fs.createWriteStream(path)
    
    const response = await axios({
        url,
        method: 'GET',
        responseType: 'stream'
    })
    
    response.data.pipe(writer)

    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        writer.on('error', reject)
        response.data.on('end', () => {
            resolve(uuid)
        })
    })
}

Hope this helps, and don’t forget to check out their documentation. Here is the
link.