Working with Tarballs

Decompress a tarball

Decompress (GzDecoder) and extract (Archive::unpack) all files from a compressed tarball named archive.tar.gz located in the current working directory to the same location.

use std::fs::File;
use flate2::read::GzDecoder;
use tar::Archive;

fn main() -> Result<(), std::io::Error> {
    let path = "archive.tar.gz";

    let tar_gz = File::open(path)?;
    let tar = GzDecoder::new(tar_gz);
    let mut archive = Archive::new(tar);
    archive.unpack(".")?;

    Ok(())
}

Compress a directory into tarball

Compress /var/log directory into archive.tar.gz.

Creates a File wrapped in GzEncoder and tar::Builder.
Adds contents of /var/log directory recursively into the archive under backup/logs path with Builder::append_dir_all. GzEncoder is responsible for transparently compressing the data prior to writing it into archive.tar.gz.

use std::fs::File;
use flate2::Compression;
use flate2::write::GzEncoder;

fn main() -> Result<(), std::io::Error> {
    let tar_gz = File::create("archive.tar.gz")?;
    let enc = GzEncoder::new(tar_gz, Compression::default());
    let mut tar = tar::Builder::new(enc);
    tar.append_dir_all("backup/logs", "/var/log")?;
    tar.finish()?;
    Ok(())
}

To add the contents without renaming them, an empty string can be used as the first argument of Builder::append_dir_all:

use std::fs::File;
use flate2::Compression;
use flate2::write::GzEncoder;

fn main() -> Result<(), std::io::Error> {
    let tar_gz = File::create("archive.tar.gz")?;
    let enc = GzEncoder::new(tar_gz, Compression::default());
    let mut tar = tar::Builder::new(enc);
    tar.append_dir_all("", "/var/log")?;
    tar.finish()?;
    Ok(())
}

The default behavior of tar::Builder differs from the GNU tar utility's defaults tar(1), notably tar::Builder::follow_symlinks(true) is the equivalent of tar --dereference.

Decompress a tarball while removing a prefix from the paths

Iterate over the Archive::entries. Use Path::strip_prefix to remove the specified path prefix (bundle/logs). Finally, extract the tar::Entry via Entry::unpack.

use anyhow::Result;
use std::fs::File;
use std::path::PathBuf;
use flate2::read::GzDecoder;
use tar::Archive;

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let file = File::open("archive.tar.gz")?;
    let mut archive = Archive::new(GzDecoder::new(file));
    let prefix = "bundle/logs";

    println!("Extracted the following files:");
    archive
        .entries()?
        .filter_map(|e| e.ok())
        .map(|mut entry| -> Result<PathBuf, Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
            let path = entry.path()?.strip_prefix(prefix)?.to_owned();
            entry.unpack(&path)?;
            Ok(path)
        })
        .filter_map(|e| e.ok())
        .for_each(|x| println!("> {}", x.display()));

    Ok(())
}