archiver

To create an archive, initialize archiver with a format (e.g., 'zip'), pipe it to a writable stream (like a file stream), append files or directories, and call .finalize().

It is recommended to listen for the warning and error events on the archive instance to handle non-blocking errors (like ENOENT) and critical failures. You should also listen for the close event on the output stream to know when the file has been fully written to disk.

// require modules
const fs = require("fs");
const archiver = require("archiver");

// create a file to stream archive data to.
const output = fs.createWriteStream(__dirname + "/example.zip");
const archive = archiver("zip", {
  zlib: { level: 9 }, // Sets the compression level.
});

// listen for all archive data to be written
// 'close' event is fired only when a file descriptor is involved
output.on("close", function () {
  console.log(archive.pointer() + " total bytes");
  console.log(
    "archiver has been finalized and the output file descriptor has closed.",
  );
});

// This event is fired when the data source is drained no matter what was the data source.
// It is not part of this library but rather from the NodeJS Stream API.
output.on("end", function () {
  console.log("Data has been drained");
});

// good practice to catch warnings (ie stat failures and other non-blocking errors)
archive.on("warning", function (err) {
  if (err.code === "ENOENT") {
    // log warning
  } else {
    // throw error
    throw err;
  }
});

// good practice to catch this error explicitly
archive.on("error", function (err) {
  throw err;
});

// pipe archive data to the file
archive.pipe(output);

// append a file from stream
const file1 = __dirname + "/file1.txt";
archive.append(fs.createReadStream(file1), { name: "file1.txt" });

// append a file from string
archive.append("string cheese!", { name: "file2.txt" });

// append a file from buffer
const buffer3 = Buffer.from("buff it!");
archive.append(buffer3, { name: "file3.txt" });

// append a file
archive.file("file1.txt", { name: "file4.txt" });

// append files from a sub-directory and naming it `new-subdir` within the archive
archive.directory("subdir/", "new-subdir");

// append files from a sub-directory, putting its contents at the root of archive
archive.directory("subdir/", false);

// append files from a glob pattern
archive.glob("file*.txt", { cwd: __dirname });

// finalize the archive (ie we are done appending files but streams have to finish yet)
archive.finalize();

Archiver provides a streaming interface for generating archives. To use it, create an archive instance (e.g., ZipArchive), pipe it to a writable stream (like a file stream), append files or directories using various methods, and finally call .finalize() to complete the process.

It is recommended to listen for warning and error events on the archive instance, and close or end events on the output stream to handle completion and potential issues.

import fs from "fs";
import { ZipArchive } from "archiver";

// create a file to stream archive data to.
const output = fs.createWriteStream(__dirname + "/example.zip");
const archive = new ZipArchive({
  zlib: { level: 9 }, // Sets the compression level.
});

// listen for all archive data to be written
// 'close' event is fired only when a file descriptor is involved
output.on("close", function () {
  console.log(archive.pointer() + " total bytes");
  console.log(
    "archiver has been finalized and the output file descriptor has closed.",
  );
});

// This event is fired when the data source is drained no matter what was the data source.
// It is not part of this library but rather from the NodeJS Stream API.
// @see: https://nodejs.org/api/stream.html#stream_event_end
output.on("end", function () {
  console.log("Data has been drained");
});

// good practice to catch warnings (ie stat failures and other non-blocking errors)
archive.on("warning", function (err) {
  if (err.code === "ENOENT") {
    // log warning
  } else {
    // throw error
    throw err;
  }
});

// good practice to catch this error explicitly
archive.on("error", function (err) {
  throw err;
});

// pipe archive data to the file
archive.pipe(output);

// append a file from stream
const file1 = __dirname + "/file1.txt";
archive.append(fs.createReadStream(file1), { name: "file1.txt" });

// append a file from string
archive.append("string cheese!", { name: "file2.txt" });

// append a file from buffer
const buffer3 = Buffer.from("buff it!");
archive.append(buffer3, { name: "file3.txt" });

// append a file
archive.file("file1.txt", { name: "file4.txt" });

// append files from a sub-directory and naming it `new-subdir` within the archive
archive.directory("subdir/", "new-subdir");

// append files from a sub-directory, putting its contents at the root of archive
archive.directory("subdir/", false);

// append files from a glob pattern
archive.glob("file*.txt", { cwd: __dirname });

// finalize the archive (ie we are done appending files but streams have to finish yet)
// 'close', 'end' or 'finish' may be fired right after calling this method so register to them beforehand
archive.finalize();

The options object passed to the Archiver constructor supports several configuration keys:

Core Options

• statConcurrency: (Number, default: 4) Sets the number of workers used to process the internal fs stat queue.

ZIP Options

• comment: (String) Sets the zip archive comment.
• forceLocalTime: (Boolean) Forces the archive to contain local file times instead of UTC.
• forceZip64: (Boolean) Forces the archive to contain ZIP64 headers.
• namePrependSlash: (Boolean) Prepends a forward slash to archive file paths.
• store: (Boolean) Sets the compression method to STORE.
• zlib: (Object) Passed to zlib to control compression.

TAR Options

• gzip: (Boolean) Compress the tar archive using gzip.
• gzipOptions: (Object) Passed to zlib to control compression.

Note: For additional TAR properties, refer to the tar-stream documentation.