How to check your files are published without access restrictions

Why downloading the file from a web browser is not enough

You can go to a publisher's data page in the IATI Registry and click the “Download” button. This will download the data in your web browser.

However, this is not enough to check that your data is fully available. Many security products such as Cloudflare will allow access from a web browser but block access from the many IATI tools that use data. For more information on this, see this guidance.

That’s why it’s important to test downloads with similar methods to the ones that will be used by other IATI tools.

Test outside your own network

If you are using the network your office or employer provides for internet access and your files are also hosted on your employer’s resources, it is important to run these tests from a different network. This may also apply if you are working from home or a co-working space, but using your employers Virtual Private Network (VPN).

This is because different security rules may be applied for employees and the general public. It’s important to make sure the general public can access these files.

Testing on Linux, Mac or Windows

On Linux, open a Terminal.

On Mac, open a Terminal. This is in the “Utilities” folder in your “Applications” folder.

On Windows, open a Command Prompt. Click start and then you should be able to search for it. You may be asked for permission to make changes to your computer. Don’t worry - the commands you will run will not make any changes to your system.

You will need the full URL of the data you want to test. You may already know this, or you can find this by opening the publisher's data page in the IATI Registry. Right click on the “Download” button and select “copy link” or “copy link address”. (It may be labelled differently in your browser)

Type (replacing the example URL with the URL of your data):

curl --user-agent "IATI download test" https://www.example.com/iatidata.xml

and press enter.

You should see XML containing some IATI data. If so, the test has passed.

If you see random content that is not IATI data, this will be an error page and the test has failed.

Testing properly over time

The tests above perform a check once. However, to really check that data is accessible, the test should be repeated over a period of time and it should make sure it works every time. This is because some websites may allow access the first time but not allow repeated access.

Contact IATI support for help with this, or anything else about publishing.