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+---
+title: "How to make cgit serve PDF files as direct downloads"
+date: 2025-11-17T23:42:00+01:00
+summary: >
+    cgit is great, but by default when you click on a PDF file in a repository content listing it will show you a
+    hexdump of the file. You can access the actual file by clicking the "plain" link on top of the listing, but that's
+    not only annoying, for large PDF files rendering the hexdump can also hang browser tabs.
+---
+
+cgit is great, but by default when you click on a PDF file in a repository content listing it will show you a
+hexdump of the file. You can access the actual file by clicking the "plain" link on top of the listing, but that's
+not only annoying, for large PDF files rendering the hexdump can also hang browser tabs.
+
+I found a quick and easy solution to this problem, which I'm documenting here because it seems nobody on the
+internet has really done this before, and the usual AI assistants (ChatGPT and Claude) are both deeply confused.
+
+You just add a simple rewrite rule to your nginx config that 302-redirects requests to ``/tree/.../foobar.pdf`` to
+``/plain/.../foobar.pdf``. Here's the rule, make sure you put them in your nginx config *before* the location directive
+proxying requests to cgit.
+
+.. code:: nginx
+
+    location ~ ^/([^/]+)/tree/(.*\.pdf)$ {
+        return 302 /$1/plain/$2;
+    }
+