Unable to download js attachment

[MuhammadSaqib (Muhammad Saqib Arfeen)]

I am getting exactly the same error as this question i.e I can upload js files after allowing it in the settings but when I try to download it, the url in the browser changes to the js file url and " The change you wanted was rejected." is displayed.

Environment:-
Discourse docker running behind Nginx (nginx is using SSL)

Discourse container logs:-

    Started GET "p5ePkm5OoKveknnMjyArlS4PPwS.js" for 192.168.32.1 at 2021-02-22 05:48:52 +0000
    Processing by UploadsController#show_short as JS
      Parameters: {"base62"=>"p5ePkm5OoKveknnMjyArlS4PPwS", "extension"=>"js"}
    Sent file afcdf626f9db8d54a1fb5e8ebcab0ea214d9226a.js (2.2ms)
    Security warning: an embedded <script> tag on another site requested protected JavaScript. If you know what you're doing, go ahead and disable forgery protection on this action to permit cross-origin JavaScript embedding.
    Completed 422 Unprocessable Entity in 59ms (ActiveRecord: 0.0ms | Allocations: 17414)
    ActionController::InvalidCrossOriginRequest (Security warning: an embedded <script> tag on another site requested protected JavaScript. If you know what you're doing, go ahead and disable forgery protection on this action to permit cross-origin JavaScript embedding.)
    /opt/bitnami/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.6.0/gems/actionpack-6.0.3.1/lib/action_controller/metal/request_forgery_protection.rb:266:in `verify_same_origin_request'

Nginx logs:-

    10.164.0.103 - - [22/Feb/2021:05:51:11 +0000] "GET /uploads/short-url/p5ePkm5OoKveknnMjyArlS4PPwS.js HTTP/2.0" 422 781 "getting-started-with-sftp-module/292" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.150 Safari/537.36"
``

Any help or pointers is appreciated!

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Are you allowing *.js files to be attached to posts by users? Do you have legitimate need for javascript file attachments by your users? Just want to absolutely confirm before we proceed any further.

[MuhammadSaqib (Muhammad Saqib Arfeen)]

Thank you for quick response!
Yes, it is a coding Q/A discussion, so attaching *.js code files is a legitimate use case.

[Daniel_Cabral]

Hi All! I’m having the same issue. We’ve allowed .js extension to be uploaded, but no one can download it. Haven’t found yet any setting to fix this. Anyone can help?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Can you describe the use case? Why is this necessary?

[MuhammadSaqib (Muhammad Saqib Arfeen)]

Hi Jeff

Although, now we copy and paste the code in the text section of the post.
Use case: We have a .js file with a kickstarter code or a solution to a recurring problem and we want to share it as an attachment, so that users can download and start using it in their projects.

However, if we change the file extension from .js to .txt, it again shows “The change you wanted was rejected.” (This may be due to some storage optimization on the backend, that if the file has the same content as a previous file, then the new attachment points to the previously uploaded file)
So, I changed the (.txt) extention js file’s content a little bit and uploaded again, and I was able to download the file as attachment.

@codinghorror Is there a security risk in allowing to download .js files?

[riking (Kane York)]

Yes; we’d need to do some browser research to make sure the file is always downloaded to disk and never executed.

[Daniel_Cabral]

We have a developers forum at fluiggers.com.br, take a look…and we do often share .js files.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Sure, there’s a lot of security issues around allowing js files, so it’s something that we have to take extreme care with.

[gerhard (Gerhard Schlager)]

The Content-Disposition header will prevent execution of downloaded JS files and we are setting it correctly:

attachment; filename="test.js"; filename*=UTF-8''test.js

It works for uploads on S3 and it should work with local uploads as well, but there seems to be a new(ish) security measure from Rails:

ActionController::InvalidCrossOriginRequest (Security warning: an embedded tag on another site requested protected JavaScript. If you know what you’re doing, go ahead and disable forgery protection on this action to permit cross-origin JavaScript embedding.)

Should be fixable…

[kuba-orlik]

I stumbled upon this same issue, we have a coding Q/A forum and need to be able to share big js files for download

[shufflepuff]

I have the same issue in my community. People would like to share JS files but when trying to download them, they get this error:

Excerpt from the rails production log:

Started GET "/uploads/short-url/qDlrltMxEIJ2aYYdt8lZ200E3wA.js" for 94.31.111.247 at 2025-07-09 05:53:30 +0000
Processing by UploadsController#show_short as JS
  Parameters: {"base62"=>"qDlrltMxEIJ2aYYdt8lZ200E3wA", "extension"=>"js"}
Sent file /var/www/discourse/public/uploads/default/original/1X/baab1fc131be960b601467333f5a690b257daeb0.js (0.3ms)
Security warning: an embedded <script> tag on another site requested protected JavaScript. If you know what you're doing, go ahead and disable forgery protection on this action to permit cross-origin JavaScript embedding.
Completed 422 Unprocessable Entity in 17ms (ActiveRecord: 0.0ms (0 queries, 0 cached) | GC: 0.0ms)

js files are in the list of allowed upload extensions: