Trigger File Download within iPython Notebook

Question

Given an iPython notebook running on an external server, is there a way to trigger a file download?

I would like to either be able to have the notebook be able to initiate the download of a file living on the the external server to the where the notebook is being rendered locally, or perform a direct string dump from the notebook workspace into a text file, downloaded locally.

I.E. a powerful and tool would be a Notebook that can query from a database, alter data, and download the query results as a CSV file.

A quick experiment showed that a cell containing the following renders a link which downloads a file. I'm hoping for a cleaner solution than rendering data into an html frame.

%%html
<a href="data:application/octet-stream,'string of things'">Download a file</a>

Answer 1

I got a working answer from the comments. FileLink did the job, which was to be able to download a file from a notebook.

from IPython.display import display, FileLink

local_file = FileLink('./demo.xlsx', result_html_prefix="Click here to download: ")
display(local_file)

For the sake of completeness, here is a similar example with FileLinks:

from IPython.display import display, FileLinks

local_file = FileLinks('./data/', result_html_prefix="Click here to download: ")
display(local_file)

It's not very pretty, so would love some advice for styling it..