Question

I have a project where I would like to create a dynamical directory tree structure without to save it on server, compress it and push it to download. Is it possible to do this?

Answer 1

You are probably looking for something like ZipArchive::addEmptyDir, which can be used to create empty directory in ZIP archive. You later can add files to that directory.

You’ll still need to save the resulting archive to disk…

$file = tempnam("tmp", "zip");
$zip = new ZipArchive();
$zip->open($file, ZIPARCHIVE::CREATE);
$zip->addEmptyDir('newDirectory');
$zip->addFromString('newDirectory/demo.txt', 'file contents');
$zip->close();

// Stream the file to the client 
header('Content-Type: application/zip'); 
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($file)); 
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="some_archive_file.zip"'); 
readfile($file); 
unlink($file);

If you desire to stream the archive without saving the archive on your end, you may try to look at PHPZip class