Download files using url in javascript

Question

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.

It isn't really clear what you are trying to acheive here. Is the flow supposed to go: The client (e.g. browser or postman) on computer A makes an HTTP request to your Next.js API running on computer B which makes an HTTP request to another API to get a URL which computer B then uses to make another HTTP request to that URL which responds with a file that computer B saves to computer B's hard disk and then sends an HTTP response to computer A saying it was successful? — Quentin
@Quentin Computer A sends a url via a post request to the API running on Computer B, I want to be able to download the file at the location pointed by the url and save it in computer B. I guess the answer mentioning the use of axios below solves my query. — venkata avinash appala

ksgr5566 ksgr5566 · Accepted Answer · 2022-07-22T10:32:22

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.

Download files using url in javascript

1 Answers