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As a Salesforce administrator or developer, you may need to download a ContentVersion file through the Salesforce REST API using Curl. In this post, we’ll show you how to download the file with Curl in a few simple steps.

First, you’ll need to execute a query and extract the Content Version File ID. To do this, you can use Workbench or the REST explorer and issue a query like this:

SELECT Id, VersionData 
FROM ContentVersion 
WHERE Title = 'titleOfFile'

Or

SELECT Title, VersionData 
FROM ContentVersion 
WHERE Id = '0684V00000Qhf3mABB'

To download a ContentVersion file in Salesforce through the REST API, you’ll need to make a GET request to this endpoint:

/services/data/vXX.0/sobjects/ContentVersion/{recordId}/VersionData

Where <strong>XX</strong> is the Salesforce API version you’re using (e.g. 56 for API version 56), and recordId is the unique identifier of the ContentVersion record you want to retrieve.

Here’s a sample request in cURL:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/octet-stream" \
  -X GET https://<instance>.salesforce.com/services/data/vXX.0/sobjects/ContentVersion/{recordId}/VersionData

Note that you’ll need to replace the following placeholder values:

• <ACCESS_TOKEN>: with a valid Salesforce access token.
• <instance>: with your Salesforce instance name (e.g. na1, eu0, etc.).
• XX: with the Salesforce API version you’re using.
• {recordId}: with the unique identifier of the ContentVersion record you want to retrieve.

Also, note that you’ll need to set the Content-Type header to application/octet-stream to indicate that you’re downloading a binary file.

In the response, the binary data of the ContentVersion file will be included in the body. You can write this data to a file on your local machine to save it.