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zip: Streaming ZIP archiver for NGINX

Installation

You can install this module in any RHEL-based distribution, including, but not limited to:

  • RedHat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9
  • CentOS 7, 8, 9
  • AlmaLinux 8, 9
  • Rocky Linux 8, 9
  • Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023
yum -y install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-latest.rpm
yum -y install nginx-module-zip

Enable the module by adding the following at the top of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

load_module modules/ngx_http_zip_module.so;

This document describes nginx-module-zip v1.2.1 released on Jul 20 2022.

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.

Tips

  1. Add a header "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=foobar.zip" in the upstream response if you would like the client to name the file "foobar.zip"

  2. To save bandwidth, add a "Last-Modified" header in the upstream response; mod_zip will then honor the "If-Range" header from clients.

  3. To wipe the X-Archive-Files header from the response sent to the client, use the headers_more module: http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpHeadersMoreModule

  4. To improve performance, ensure the backends are not returning gzipped files. You can achieve this with proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding ""; in the location blocks for the component files.

Questions/patches may be directed to Evan Miller, emmiller@gmail.com.

GitHub

You may find additional configuration tips and documentation for this module in the GitHub repository for nginx-module-zip.