Node.js - Zip/Unzip a folder

Question

I'm diving into Zlib of node.js. I was able to compress and uncompress files using the provided examples (http://nodejs.org/api/zlib.html#zlib_examples) but I didn't be able to find more about doing the same for folders? One possibility (but that I consider as tinkering) is to use `node-zip` module and adding all the files of the folder one by one. But I'll face a problem when uncompressing (I will lose the folders in this case). Any idea how to compress (and then uncompress) a whole folder (respecting the sub-solders hierarchy) using Node.js? Thanks.

Accepted Answer

I've finally got it, with the help of @generalhenry (see comments on the question) and

as mentioned in the comments, we need to compress the folder in two steps:

Convert the folder into a `.tar` file

Compress the `.tar` file

In order to perform the first step, I needed two node.js modules:

```
npm install tar
npm install fstream
```

The first one allows us to create `.tar` files. You can have access to the source code here https://github.com/isaacs/node-tar

The second node module will help us to read a folder and write a file. Concerning the basic `fs` node.js module, I don't know if it is possible to read a directory (I'm not talking about getting all the files in an array, using `fs.readdir`, but handling all the files and their organization in folders).

Then, when I convert the folder to `.tar` file, I can compress it using `Gzip()` of `Zlib`.

Here is the final code:

```
var fstream = require('fstream'),
    tar = require('tar'),
    zlib = require('zlib');

fstream.Reader({ 'path': 'path/to/my/dir/', 'type': 'Directory' }) /* Read the source directory */
.pipe(tar.Pack()) /* Convert the directory to a .tar file */
.pipe(zlib.Gzip()) /* Compress the .tar file */
.pipe(fstream.Writer({ 'path': 'compressed_folder.tar.gz' })); /* Give the output file name */
```

This helped me to compress an entire folder using node.js

2 more things:

As you can see, there is a lack of documentation on `tar` module. I hope this will be improved soon since the two examples that was provided talk about how to extract content from the `.tar` file.

I used the `fstream` module to help me handle the source directory. Can this be bypassed using `fs`? I don't know (please, comment if you have an idea).

Node.js - Zip/Unzip a folder

Solution

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