mod_zip assembles ZIP archives dynamically. It can stream component files from upstream servers with nginx's native proxying code, so that the process never takes up more than a few KB of RAM at a time, even while assembling archives that are (potentially) gigabytes in size.
mod_zip supports a number of "modern" ZIP features, including large files, UTC timestamps, and UTF-8 filenames. It allows clients to resume large downloads using the "Range" and "If-Range" headers, although these feature require the server to know the file checksums (CRC-32's) in advance. See "Usage" for details.
To unzip files on the fly, check out nginx-unzip-module.
To install, compile nginx with the following option:
--add-module=/path/to/mod_zip
- nginx 1.10.0 or later is required
- (optional) to enable the
X-Archive-Charsetheader, libiconv is required - http_postpone must be enabled by including at least one of the http_addition, http_slice or http_ssi modules
The module is activated when the original response (presumably from an upstream) includes the following HTTP header:
X-Archive-Files: zip
It then scans the response body for a list of files. The syntax is a space-separated list of the file checksum (CRC-32), size (in bytes), location (properly URL-encoded), and file name. One file per line. The file location corresponds to a location in your nginx.conf; the file can be on disk, from an upstream, or from another module. The file name can include a directory path, and is what will be extracted from the ZIP file. Example:
1034ab38 428 /foo.txt My Document1.txt
83e8110b 100339 /bar.txt My Other Document1.txt
0 0 @directory My empty directory
Files are retrieved and encoded in order. If a file cannot be found or the file request returns any sort of error, the download is aborted.
The CRC-32 is optional. Put "-" if you don't know the CRC-32; note that in this
case mod_zip will disable support for the Range header.
A special URL marker @directory can be used to declare a directory entry
within an archive. This is very convenient when you have to package a tree of
files, including some empty directories. As they have to be declared explicitly.
If you want mod_zip to include some HTTP headers of the original request, in the sub-requests that fetch content of files, then pass the list of their names in the following HTTP header:
X-Archive-Pass-Headers: <header-name>[:<header-name>]*
To re-encode the filenames as UTF-8, add the following header to the upstream response:
X-Archive-Charset: [original charset name]
The original charset name should be something that iconv understands. (This feature only works if iconv is present.)
If you set original charset as native:
X-Archi