Your Easy Guide to Zip Files in Laravel

How to create zip file and download in Laravel using ZipArchive class

Create zip file and download in Laravel - PHP

In this article we will learn how to create zip of multiple file and download it using ZipArchive class of PHP . We will take an example where we will retrieve image names from DB and images are available in our local project directory and then we will convert it to Zip .

ZipArchive class provides lots of built-in methods to work with zip files but in this example we will use some basic methods of ZipArchive class to convert our multiple files to zip file .

Some of the basic ZipArchive class methods are like ZipArchive::CREATE which is used to create a zip file , $zip->open() method basically takes two parameter that is zip file name and the ZipArchive::CREATE method . Similarly some other methods are $zip->addFile() used to add multiple file to the zip and $zip->close() this method is used to close the zip file after you added all the file inside the zip .

Lets understand how to create zip and download it via example .

Step 1 - Create Route :

Route::get('/downloadzip','UserController@downloadZip')->name('download-zip');

Step 2 - Code in Controller :

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\ImgUpload;
use ZipArchive;
use File;
class UserController extends Controller
{

/**
 * Function to get all images from DB
 */
public function downloadZip()
{
  $data = ImgUpload::all();
  foreach($data as $key => $value)
  {
    $imgarr[] = "storage/image". '/' . $value->image;
  }

  $ziplink = $this->converToZip($imgarr);
  return $ziplink;


}
/**
 * Function to covert all DB files to Zip
 */
public function converToZip($imgarr)
{
            $zip = new ZipArchive;
            $storage_path = 'storage/image';
            $timeName = time();
            $zipFileName = $storage_path . '/' . $timeName . '.zip';
            $zipPath = asset($zipFileName);
            if ($zip->open(($zipFileName), ZipArchive::CREATE) === true) {
                foreach ($imgarr as $relativName) {
                    $zip->addFile($relativName,"/".$timeName."/".basename($relativName));
                }
                $zip->close();

                if ($zip->open($zipFileName) === true) {
                    return $zipPath;
                } else {
                    return false;
                }
            }
}

}

Step 3 - Now hit your Route :

After hitting your route you will get the link of the zip file created on the folder you specified . Now you can use the link to download the zip file .