express-static-zip

Serve static files out of a ZIP without unpacking.

About

Adding client-side dependency libraries to the repository is a good practice, but there are huge ones like dojo and some proprietary ones like Arcgis JS API containing thousands of small files, making it a mess. You either go with them, making the repo some ten times slower, or use some (probably internally) hosted ones, messing with versions and switching paths.

This module provides means to serving such libraries or arbitrary static file packages right out of a ZIP without unpacking. Zipped library goes well with the repos even being several tens of megabytes in size. Zipped library doesn't pollute your repo with its contents.

You can add a classic express.static for production environment, with an unzip deployment script.

Example

Provided you have a biglib.zip in your root server folder, and serving library on url root:

var express = require('express');
var staticZip = require('express-static-zip');

var app = express();

app.use(staticZip('./biglib.zip'));

app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000);

Now you are free to GET /some/files/inside/zip.txt

Options

app.use(staticZip('./biglib.zip', {
  zipRoot = "a-folder/";  // Default: ""
                          // Use a directory inside ZIP file as the root
}));

Additional info

Zip compressed content is loaded to memory synchronously at startup. It doesn't take long, some 50-300ms for a 20Mb JS lib with some 15k files.

Files are uncompressed and cached in-memory upon request.