Zip a File with PHP

My blog doesn't rely on MySQL to output each post, instead i generate my pages on my home comp and upload them to the server. It would be a big hassle to FTP 20 files one by one, so instead I zip all the files automatically first, before uploading to my server.

PHP has some zip functionality if you enable the zlib library in your PHP ini. I don't really like to include too many random libraries for tasks that php itself shouldn't be handling.

Instead I call 7-zip through the command line. In linux you can use p7zip. It comes with documentation over all the command line options.

It simplifies things to make bash or batch file first. The basic command line Structure for 7zip is as follows.

7z.exe [what action to take] [additional options] [filenames]

Simple Examples

On Windows: foo.bat

del "C:\blah.zip"
"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip "C:\blah.zip" "file1" "file2" "dir\*.*"


On Linux: foo.sh

rm "/home/blah/blah.zip"
"/path/to/7z.exe" a -tzip "/home/blah/blah.zip" "/file1" "/file2" "/dir/*.*"

Then call your batch or shell file in php. Technically you could skip the batch/shell thing but why be messy.

exec("/path/to/foo.whatever");

7zip Command Line options

7z.exe [command] [switches] [arguments]

Commands

a Add

b Benchmark

d Delete

e Extract

l List

t Test

u Update

x eXtract with full paths

Switches

-- Stop switches parsing

-ai Include archive filenames

-an Disable parsing of archive_name

-ao Overwrite mode

-ax Exclude archive filenames

-i Include filenames

-m Set Compression Method

-o Set Output directory

-p Set Password

-r Recurse subdirectories

-scs Set charset for list files

-seml Send archive by email

-slp Set Large Pages mode

-slt Show technical information

-sfx Create SFX archive

-si Read data from StdIn

-so Write data to StdOut

-ssc Set Sensitive Case mode

-ssw Compress files open for writing

-t Type of archive

-u Update options

-v Create Volumes

-w Set Working directory

-x Exclude filenames

-y Assume Yes on all queries

Wild Cards

'*' means a sequence of arbitrary characters.

'?' means any character.

Wildcard Examples

*.txt means all files with an extension of ".txt"

?a* means all files with a second character of "a"

*1* means all names that contains character "1"

*.*.* means all names that contain two "." means characters

Exit Codes

0 No error

1 Warning (Non fatal error(s)). For example, one or more files were locked by some other application, so they were not compressed.

2 Fatal error

7 Command line error

8 Not enough memory for operation

255 User stopped the process

Other Possibilities

You can also use winrar and unrar the files. It also works in linux. There's alwaysgzip too. It's just a matter of getting the command line options down. 7zip was way more processor intensive when extracting a massive 7zip archive. Winrar is much kinder if you're going to be handling bigger files. 7zip has a much higher compression quality if you archive into their .7z format

Tags: 7zip cli, command line arguements, arguments, tar, untar, deflate, gzip, unrar linux