Create zip file in dart

Creating a zip file in Dart is not that hard. Though there are not many packages right now to work with, so far we have only two packages which we can use to create zip, tar and others in dart.

If you have not installed dart yet please go to my post here.

Visit Pub Dev where you can find all kinds of packages for Flutter and Dart. Some packages work with both Flutter and Dart but not all of them.

Go to https://pub.dev/ and search zip you will find these two packages

1. Archive https://pub.dev/packages/archive, for Dart and Flutter.
2. Flutter Archive https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_archive for only Flutter project. 

In our case we will use the Archive package since we are testing in a console application. 

The Archive library currently supports the following decoders:

• Zip (Archive)
• Tar (Archive)
• ZLib [Inflate decompression]
• GZip [Inflate decompression]
• BZip2 [decompression]

Add Archive package in your project 

With Dart

dart pub add archive

With Flutter

flutter pub add archive

Our pubspec.yaml

name: Create zip file in dart
description: A sample command-line application to create zip file
version: 1.0.0
homepage: https://flutterframework.com/

environment:
  sdk: '>=2.10.0 <3.0.0'

dependencies:
  archive: ^3.1.2

dev_dependencies:
  pedantic: ^1.9.0
  test: ^1.14.4

Our main zip.dart

import 'package:zip/zip.dart' as zip;

void main(List<String> arguments) {
  zip.createZip();
}

and lib/zip.dart

import 'dart:io';

import 'package:archive/archive.dart';
import 'package:archive/archive_io.dart';

void createZip() {
  final logDir = Directory.current.path + '/log';
  final zipLocation = Directory.current.path + '/log.zip';

  var encoder = ZipFileEncoder();
  encoder.zipDirectory(Directory(logDir), filename: zipLocation);

  // Manually create a zip of a directory and individual files.
  encoder.create(Directory.current.path + '/log2.zip');
  encoder.addFile(File('another_file.txt'));
  
  encoder.close();
}

Line number 10 creates a zip file in the destination file(line 8), from line 7 which is a directory containing few txt files.

You can create more zip file in the same encoder process, line 16 and more file line 17.

Download the source code from github.com