tar

What is tar?

The tar npm package is used for manipulating tarballs, which are archives of files and directories. It allows users to create new tarballs, extract files from existing tarballs, and list or update the contents of tarballs. It is a JavaScript implementation of the POSIX tar command and is commonly used in Node.js applications for handling tar files.

What are tar's main functionalities?

Creating a tarball

This feature allows you to create a tarball. The example code demonstrates how to create a gzipped tarball named 'my-tarball.tgz' that contains 'file1.js' and 'file2.txt'.

const tar = require('tar');
tar.c(
  {
    gzip: true,
    file: 'my-tarball.tgz'
  },
  ['file1.js', 'file2.txt']
).then(_ => console.log('Tarball has been created.'));

Extracting a tarball

This feature allows you to extract files from a tarball. The example code demonstrates how to extract 'my-tarball.tgz' into the directory 'some/dir'.

const tar = require('tar');
tar.x(
  {
    file: 'my-tarball.tgz',
    C: 'some/dir'
  }
).then(_ => console.log('Tarball has been extracted.'));

Listing contents of a tarball

This feature allows you to list the contents of a tarball. The example code demonstrates how to list the paths of all files and directories in 'my-tarball.tgz'.

const tar = require('tar');
tar.t(
  {
    file: 'my-tarball.tgz',
    onentry: entry => console.log(entry.path)
  }
).then(_ => console.log('Contents have been listed.'));

Updating a tarball

This feature allows you to update a tarball by adding new files. The example code demonstrates how to add 'newfile.txt' to the existing 'my-tarball.tgz'.

const tar = require('tar');
tar.u(
  {
    file: 'my-tarball.tgz'
  },
  ['newfile.txt']
).then(_ => console.log('Tarball has been updated.'));

Other packages similar to tar

archiver

Archiver is a streaming interface for archive generation, supporting ZIP and TAR formats. It offers more customization options for creating archives compared to tar, such as appending files from streams, buffers, or the file system with specific archive options.

compressing

Compressing is a powerful and flexible node.js compression library that supports various archive formats like tar, zip, gzip, and bzip2. It provides both streaming and promise-based APIs, which can be more convenient for certain use cases compared to tar.

node-tar

Node-tar is another tarball manipulation library that can handle large files and supports streaming. It is similar to the tar package but is maintained by a different group of developers. It may have different performance characteristics or API nuances.

README

node-tar

Tar for Node.js.

API

See examples/ for usage examples.

var tar = require('tar')

Returns an object with .Pack, .Extract and .Parse methods.

tar.Pack([properties])

Returns a through stream. Use fstream to write files into the pack stream and you will receive tar archive data from the pack stream.

This only works with directories, it does not work with individual files.

The optional properties object are used to set properties in the tar 'Global Extended Header'. If the fromBase property is set to true, the tar will contain files relative to the path passed, and not with the path included.

tar.Extract([options])

Returns a through stream. Write tar data to the stream and the files in the tarball will be extracted onto the filesystem.

options can be:

{
  path: '/path/to/extract/tar/into',
  strip: 0, // how many path segments to strip from the root when extracting
}

options also get passed to the fstream.Writer instance that tar uses internally.

tar.Parse()

Returns a writable stream. Write tar data to it and it will emit entry events for each entry parsed from the tarball. This is used by tar.Extract.