Overriding Content-Disposition and Content-Type on Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3

I have been struggling to override the Content-Disposition and Content-Type headers of Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3 responses. As you might know both S3 and Cloud Storage let you generate signed URLs (possibly set to expire in a specified amount of time) to access stored objects. Signed URLs are often used to grant non-authenticated users temporary access to otherwise private objects. When the user opens a signed URL you may want the browser to download the object rather than trying to render it. It might as well be the case that the name you identify the object with is not the name you want the user to see when downloading the file. The Content-Disposition header of a response, if set properly, can tell the browser to download the object and can even set a default filename in the SaveAs prompt.

The question is: how do I set the Content-Disposition header of S3 and Storage responses?

Digging into Amazon’s and Google’s documentation I found the response-content-disposition parameter: if added to a signed URL it overrides the Content-Disposition header of the response allowing, for instance, to show a SaveAs prompt when accessing the object. Given a signed URL, you can override the Content-Disposition to download the file as newfile.ext2:

<signed URL>&response-content-disposition=attachment; filename="newfile.ext2"

More details on Content-Disposition header’s format can can be found here. If you are interested, it is also possible to override the Content-Type header of a response by providing the response-content-type parameter.

Please notice that both response-content-disposition and response-content-type parameters must not be part of URL’s signature, they can be simply appended once the URL has been signed.