useDownloadBytes Hook

useDownloadBytes hook is used to directly download a file as bytes from Firebase Storage. Instead of useDownloadLink hook, this hook might be useful to process a file byte by byte instead of directly downloading to the user's machine.

A very simple example would be:

const reference = ref(storage, "path/to/remote/file.png");
const { dispatch } = useDownloadBytes(reference);
const bytes = await dispatch(file);

Warning

useDownloadBytes is lazy by default and will not do anything until you use dispatch function.

You can get the state of the progress with this example.

const { state } = useDownloadBytes(reference);
const bytes = await dispatch();
// `state` is "ready" | "loading" | "done"

dispatch method will return an instance of [Blob][BlobDoc], but additionally, you can also listen to [Blob][BlobDoc] from useDownloadBytes hook as well:

const { bytes } = useDownloadBytes(reference);
// bytes updates and rerenders when the state is `"done"`
// until then, it is `undefined`
await dispatch();

Input Parameters

Input parameters for useDownloadBytes hook is as follows:

Name	Type	Description	Required	Default Value
reference	firebase/storage/StorageReference	Reference to a file in Storage.	✅	-

Return Type

useDownloadBytes hook returns an object with properties as below:

Name	Type	Description
bytes	ArrayBuffer or undefined	The bytes of remote file to read. undefined if the state is not "done".
state	"ready" | "loading" | "done"	The state of the process.
dispatch	(maxDownloadSizeBytes? number) => Promise<string>	A callback to start the process and return the link. You can also define how many bytes to download at most.