Respond with file download to incoming HTTP request

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Built by Tom Tom
Created on June 05, 2026

Description

This simple workflow demonstrates how to get an end user's browser to download a file. It makes use of the Content-Disposition header to set a filename and control the browser behaviour.



A use case could be the download of a PDF file at the end of an application process or to export data from a database without replacing the current page content in the browser.

With this approach, the current page remains open and the file is simply downloaded instead:



The original idea was first present here by @dickhoning in the n8n community.

Nodes Used (1)

HTTP Request
n8n-nodes-base.httpRequest