Serving a Google Drive Resume on My Domain (Without .pdf)

I wanted my resume to live at:

abhinavganeshan.in/resume

and not resume.pdf, not Google Drive’s UI, and not a redirect that changes the URL.

The goal was simple:

• Clean URL
• No Google Drive chrome
• PDF rendered inline
• Resume updates automatically when I update it in Drive

Below is what worked, what didn’t, and the final approach that solved everything cleanly.

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Naive Solution (Works, But Ugly)

Put the PDF in the public folder.

abhinavganeshan.in/resume.pdf

This works, but the .pdf extension was not what I wanted.

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Embed Google Drive Preview

// src/app/resume/page.tsx
export default function Page() {
  return (
    <iframe
      src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/FILE_ID/preview"
      className="h-screen w-full"
    />
  );
}

The URL looked fine, but Google Drive’s UI appeared inside the iframe, clashing with the site layout.

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Redirects (URL Changes)

async redirects() {
  return [
    {
      source: "/resume",
      destination: "https://drive.google.com/file/d/FILE_ID",
      permanent: false,
    },
  ];
}

This works functionally, but the browser ends up on drive.google.com. The original domain is lost.

---

Rewrites (Still Doesn’t Work)

async rewrites() {
  return [
    {
      source: "/resume",
      destination: "https://drive.google.com/file/d/FILE_ID",
    },
  ];
}

Google Drive responds with redirects anyway, so the URL still changes.

Adding /preview leads to CORS errors because the browser attempts to fetch cross-origin content directly.

---

Final Solution: Server-Side Proxy

Instead of letting the browser fetch Google Drive, fetch it from the server.

// app/resume/route.ts

const driveUrl =
  "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=FILE_ID";

export async function GET() {
  const res = await fetch(driveUrl);

  if (!res.ok || !res.body) {
    return new Response("Failed to fetch PDF", { status: 502 });
  }

  return new Response(res.body, {
    headers: {
      "Content-Type": "application/pdf",
      "Content-Disposition": "inline; filename=Abhinav-Resume.pdf",
    },
  });
}

Why this works

• No CORS issues – Server-to-server requests are not affected by CORS
• Clean URL – /resume stays /resume
• Inline rendering – Browser displays the PDF directly
• Auto-updates – Updating the file in Drive updates the site instantly

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Result

abhinavganeshan.in/resume

• No .pdf
• No Google Drive UI
• No redirects
• No redeploys when the resume changes

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When This Pattern Is Useful

• Resumes
• PDFs generated in Google Docs
• Reports
• Press kits
• Certificates
• Any file you want hosted logically on your domain but physically elsewhere

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This approach may be slightly overkill, but it’s clean, predictable, and easy to maintain.