With Easy Digital Downloads, you can configure to deliver files to customers in two ways, ‘Redirect’ and ‘Forced’. Both of these methods will result in the same goal of the customer downloading a file. There might be some unique cases in which you may need to use one or the other.
You can find the setting in Downloads > Settings > Misc > File Download as shown below.
- Forced
If you are using the forced method, then Easy Digital Downloads will break the file into smaller pieces. Which then will be delivered to the browser without redirecting the user to the actual file.
This method is useful if the files are delivered via a content delivery network (CDN) or for advanced hosting configurations where files may not be stored in the default directories. The Forced method is set as default due to its consistency in multiple platforms and better file protection.
As EDD uses PHP to process the files with this method, it can cause problems delivering larger files. If the users are getting 404 or 403 errors then changing to the ‘redirect’ method can help resolve this.
- Redirect
This is the more simple of the two. It works by telling the user’s browser the location of the file, and it processes downloading directly from the server. This method of delivering files is suitable for using certain server configurations that do not support the Forced (default) file delivery method, or files are being hosted by a 3rd party (Amazon S3 or Dropbox) that does not support the Forced method.
If you want to use the ‘Redirect’ method for the self-hosted files then use the ‘Symlink’ option if possible. If you are using this method for self-hosting files then it could result in customers who are downloading files to see the direct path to the file, so using Symlik is recommended.
Also, this does rely on the browser to handle the bulk of the work, and depending on browser configuration can result in unexpected results for some filetypes. The ‘redirect’ method is better for large files. Also, it is recommended to host large files on Amazon S3 or Dropbox.
Note: The symlink setting does not apply to Amazon S3 or Dropbox.