Need to ZIP an entire directory using Node.js

Question

I ended up using archiver lib. Works great.

Example

var file_system = require('fs');
var archiver = require('archiver');

var output = file_system.createWriteStream('target.zip');
var archive = archiver('zip');

output.on('close', function () {
    console.log(archive.pointer() + ' total bytes');
    console.log('archiver has been finalized and the output file descriptor has closed.');
});

archive.on('error', function(err){
    throw err;
});

archive.pipe(output);

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

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

archive.finalize();

I'm not going to show something new, just wanted to summarise the solutions above for those who like Promises as much as I do 😉.

const archiver = require('archiver');

/**
 * @param {String} sourceDir: /some/folder/to/compress
 * @param {String} outPath: /path/to/created.zip
 * @returns {Promise}
 */
function zipDirectory(sourceDir, outPath) {
  const archive = archiver('zip', { zlib: { level: 9 }});
  const stream = fs.createWriteStream(outPath);

  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    archive
      .directory(sourceDir, false)
      .on('error', err => reject(err))
      .pipe(stream)
    ;

    stream.on('close', () => resolve());
    archive.finalize();
  });
}

Hope it will help someone 🤞

Use Node's native child_process api to accomplish this.

No need for third party libs. Two lines of code.

const child_process = require("child_process");
child_process.execSync(`zip -r DESIRED_NAME_OF_ZIP_FILE_HERE *`, {
  cwd: PATH_TO_FOLDER_YOU_WANT_ZIPPED_HERE
});

I'm using the synchronous API. You can use child_process.exec(path, options, callback) if you need async. There are a lot more options than just specifying the CWD to further finetune your requests. See exec/execSync docs.

---

Please note: This example assumes you have the zip utility installed on your system (it comes with OSX, at least). Some operating systems may not have utility installed (i.e., AWS Lambda runtime doesn't). In that case, you can easily obtain the zip utility binary here and package it along with your application source code (for AWS Lambda you can package it in a Lambda Layer as well), or you'll have to either use a third party module (of which there are plenty on NPM). I prefer the former approach, as the ZIP utility is tried and tested for decades.

Archive.bulk is now deprecated, the new method to be used for this is glob:

var fileName =   'zipOutput.zip'
var fileOutput = fs.createWriteStream(fileName);

fileOutput.on('close', function () {
    console.log(archive.pointer() + ' total bytes');
    console.log('archiver has been finalized and the output file descriptor has closed.');
});

archive.pipe(fileOutput);
archive.glob("../dist/**/*"); //some glob pattern here
archive.glob("../dist/.htaccess"); //another glob pattern
// add as many as you like
archive.on('error', function(err){
    throw err;
});
archive.finalize();