How can I generate zip file without saving to the disk with Ruby?

Question

I have generated many PDF files in memory and I want to compress them into one zip file before sending it as a email attachment. I have looked at Rubyzip and it does not all

Answer 1

There are two RubyZip libraries that I was able to find.

1. Chilkat's Ruby Zip Library
2. rubyzip on Sourceforge

Chilkat's library definitely allows one to create a zip file in memory instead of writing it to disk automatically as seen in these links: Zip to Memory, Zip from in memory data

The one on SourceForge, on the other hand, may provide an option of zipping a file in memory but I'm not entirely certain since I'm very new to ruby. The SourceForge rubyzip is based on java.util.zip which has led to it having a class called ZipOutputStream. I don't know how good the rubyzip implementation is, but with java.util.zip implementation the OutputStream can be set to ByteArrayOutputStream, FileOutputStream, FilterOutputStream, ObjectOutputStream, OutputStream, PipedOutputStream....

If that holds true for the rubyzip implementation then it should be a matter of using ZipOutputStream to pass in a ByteArrayOutputStream of sorts which would result in it being output to memory.

If it doesn't exist in rubyzip, then I'm sure you could always write your own implementation and submit it for inclusion in rubyzip seeing as it is opensource.