Zipping a directory in Rails [closed]

Question

How do i go about zipping a directory in ruby on rails? I've tried rubyzip without success. I don't need to zip the contents of the dir individually just zip the dir itself.

Mosley

What's difficult to figure out? Yarin tried rubyzip, didn't like it. Just wants to zip a directory and needs to know the best way to do it. What's confusing? – Buchholz

What does it mean to zip a directory, but not its contents? All of the answers zip the directory including the contents, so none of them have addressed the question as asked. – Coimbra

Answer 1

You are going to have to loop through the items in the directory to add an entry in the compressed file.

def compress(path)
  gem 'rubyzip'
  require 'zip/zip'
  require 'zip/zipfilesystem'

  path.sub!(%r[/$],'')
  archive = File.join(path,File.basename(path))+'.zip'
  FileUtils.rm archive, :force=>true

  Zip::ZipFile.open(archive, 'w') do |zipfile|
    Dir["#{path}/**/**"].reject{|f|f==archive}.each do |file|
      zipfile.add(file.sub(path+'/',''),file)
    end
  end
end

http://grosser.it/2009/02/04/compressing-a-folder-to-a-zip-archive-with-ruby/

Another way to do it with a command

Dir["*"].each do |file|
  if File.directory?(file)
    #TODO add OS specific,
    #  7z or tar .
    `zip -r "#{file}.zip" "#{file}"`
  end
end

http://ruby-indah-elegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/zipping-folders-in-folder-ruby-script.html

Update

Thank you Mahmoud Khaled for the edit/update

for the new version use Zip::File.open instead of Zip::ZipFile.open

Silk

the second way doesn't wok on many hosting environments because they don't include zip.exe in their VM. Heroku for instance doesn't. – Modie

But what the way are better? To use ruby or zip/gzip utility on production and why? – Siloxane

First one is better, because it is using a Ruby library. The second one just calls zip.exe in a Windows environment – Silk

Answer 2

You can create an archive of the directory using tar tar -cvf your_dir.tar your_dir/

and then compress the tar in rails using -

def gzip_my_dir_tar(your_dir_tar_file)
  content = File.read(your_dir_tar_file)
  ActiveSupport::Gzip.compress(content)
end

Its already answered at Rails 3: How do I generate a compressed file on request

Cornwell

Zip is completely different from tar + gzip – Forfeit