How to download and unzip a zip file in memory in NodeJs?

Question

I want to download a zip file from the internet and unzip it in memory without saving to a temporary file. How can I do this?

Here is what I tried:

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Answer 1

If you're under MacOS or Linux, you can use the unzip command to unzip from stdin.

In this example I'm reading the zip file from the filesystem into a Buffer object but it works with a downloaded file as well:

// Get a Buffer with the zip content
var fs = require("fs")
  , zip = fs.readFileSync(__dirname + "/test.zip");


// Now the actual unzipping:
var spawn = require('child_process').spawn
  , fileToExtract = "test.js"
    // -p tells unzip to extract to stdout
  , unzip = spawn("unzip", ["-p", "/dev/stdin", fileToExtract ])
  ;

// Write the Buffer to stdin
unzip.stdin.write(zip);

// Handle errors
unzip.stderr.on('data', function (data) {
  console.log("There has been an error: ", data.toString("utf-8"));
});

// Handle the unzipped stdout
unzip.stdout.on('data', function (data) {
  console.log("Unzipped file: ", data.toString("utf-8"));
});

unzip.stdin.end();

Which is actually just the node version of:

cat test.zip | unzip -p /dev/stdin test.js

EDIT: It's worth noting that this will not work if the input zip is too big to be read in one chunk from stdin. If you need to read bigger files, and your zip file contains only one file, you can use funzip instead of unzip:

var unzip = spawn("funzip");

If your zip file contains multiple files (and the file you want isn't the first one) I'm afraid to say you're out of luck. Unzip needs to seek in the .zip file since zip files are just a container, and unzip may just unzip the last file in it. In that case you have to save the file temporarily (node-temp comes in handy).