Ngzip

This gem allows easy integration of nginx mod_zip into your ruby/rails application by providing the formatted output list and a HTTP header to use the on-thy-fly creation of ZIP archives.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ngzip'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install ngzip

Usage

In a controller

b = Ngzip::Builder.new()
response.headers['X-Archive-Files'] = 'zip'
render :text => b.build(["/data/test/Report.pdf", "/data/test/LargeArchive.tar"])

This will generate a manifest similar to this

8f92322f 446 /data/test/Report.pdf Report.pdf
13788d9a 234 /data/test/LargeArchive.tar LargeArchive.tar

Directories in the archive

The builder will automatically remove common directory prefix for the pathes inside the archive. If you want to keep relative directories inside, specify the :base_dir option when calling the builder:

options = {:base_dir => '/data'}
render :text => b.build(["/data/test/Report.pdf", "/data/test/LargeArchive.tar"], options)

This will generate

8f92322f 446 /data/test/Report.pdf test/Report.pdf
13788d9a 234 /data/test/LargeArchive.tar test/LargeArchive.tar

nginx configuration

Compile nginx with the mod_zip module from https://github.com/evanmiller/mod_zip.

Configure nginx to serve files with absolute paths from an internal location

# mod_zip location helper
# Note: The leading ^~ is essential here, no more checks should be done after this match
location ^~ /data/ {
    root /;
    internal;
}

Note that we only operate with local files in this examples. The module mod_zip uses subrequests to fetch the actual file data and would support any location type (even proxied).

License

This project is licenced under the MIT License.