How can I generate zip file without saving to the disk with Ruby?

ruby, zip

Solution

I had a similar problem which I solved using the rubyzip gem and the stringio object. It turns out that rubyzip provides a method that returns a stringio object: `ZipOutputStream.write_buffer`.

You can create the zip file structure as you like using `put_next_entry` and write and once you are finished you can rewind the stringio and read the binary data using sysread.

See the following simple example (works for rubyzip 0.9.X)

require 'zip/zip'
stringio = Zip::OutputStream.write_buffer do |zio|
  zio.put_next_entry("test.txt")
  zio.write "Hello world!"
end
stringio.rewind
binary_data = stringio.sysread

Tested on jruby 1.6.5.1 (ruby-1.9.2-p136) (2011-12-27 1bf37c2) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_29) [Windows Server 2008-amd64-java])

The following example works for rubyzip >= 1.0.0

require 'rubygems'    
require 'zip'
stringio = Zip::OutputStream.write_buffer do |zio|
  zio.put_next_entry("test.txt")
  zio.write "Hello world!"
end
binary_data = stringio.string

Tested on jruby 1.7.22 (1.9.3p551) 2015-08-20 c28f492 on OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 1.7.0_79-b14 +jit [linux-amd64] and rubyzip gem 1.1.7

Problem

I have generated many PDF files in memory and I want to compress them into one zip file before sending it as a email attachment. I have looked at Rubyzip and it does not allows me to create a zip file without saving it to disk (maybe I am wrong). Is there any way I can compress those file without creating a temp file?

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