Forcing vCard downloads on the web

A vCard is like an electronic business card. VCards are often attached to emails, or placed on the contact page of a website (see my contact page, for example). VCards can be easily imported into Outlook, and clicking a vCard link in OSX will automatically add the contact details to your Apple Address Book.

Putting a vCard on your website ought to be very straightforward: just place the file, with its .vcf extension, onto your web server and put a link to it on your contact page. But, like me, you may run into a problem here. When you click on the link in the web page, you may find that the browser opens the vCard file into the browser window, instead of starting a download

There are 2 different ways to solve this problem. The first one is to modify your web server so that it serves up the correct MIME type for the vCard file in the HTTP header. In Apache, for example, you could set this up in the main MIME type configuration file (if you have access to it) or you can set it in a local .htaccess file by adding the following line:

AddType text/x-vcard .vcf

See this article for more details.

The second way to approach the problem is to setup the HTTP headers dynamically. HTTP headers cannot be set on an HTML page of course: an HTML page will have its own headers. To manipulate the headers explicitly you will need to use a server-side scripting language such as PHP or ASP. A decent PHP script for doing this can be found at elouai.com/force-download.php. Note that it is a good idea to hardcode your vCard filename into the script itself to prevent hackers from hijacking the script.