Creating ZIP files in Elixir is easy because of Erlang’s :zip module. Here’s how to create a ZIP archive both on disk and in memory.
To make the ZIP archive, we’ll use :zip.create/3 from Erlang:
{ok, filename} = :zip.create("file.zip", files)
The function accepts only charlists for file names, so we have to convert the file names first with String.to_charlist/1:
files = files |> Enum.map(&String.to_charlist/1)
In case you want to archive all files from a given directory, you can use File.ls! to build the file names list:
files = File.ls!("/path/to/dir") |> Enum.map(&String.to_charlist/1)
{ok, filename} = :zip.create("file.zip", files, cwd: "/path/to/dir")
In this case, I am using the cwd option (as “current working directory”) to set where the file is and prevent absolute paths from being included.
If you need a temporary directory for this or for saving the final archive, you can use Temp.path!/0 and File.mkdir/1:
tmp_dir = Temp.path!()
dir = File.mkdir(tmp_dir)
Finally, :zip.create/3 has an option to create the ZIP file entirely in memory, if that’s what you need:
{:ok, {filename, bytes}} = :zip.create("file.zip", [{'file1', "file 1 content"}, {'file2',"file 2 content"}], [:memory])
