Compressing a directory of files with PHP

Question

I am creating a php backup script that will dump everything from a database and save it to a file. I have been successful in doing that but now I need to take hundreds of images in a directory and compress them into one simple .tar.gz file.

What is the best way to do this and how is it done? I have no idea where to start.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can easily gzip a folder using this command:

tar -cvzpf backup.tar.gz /path/to/folder

This command can be ran through phps system()-function.

Don't forget to escapeshellarg() all commands.

Answer 2

Erm...

Why use PHP for this kind of things?

tar -czvvf somearchive.tar.gz file1 ... filen

I recommend file1 be a common root directory and hence also filen

Answer 3

If you are using PHP 5.2>, you could use the Zip Library

and then do something along the lines of:

$images = '/path/to/images';
//this folder must be writeable by the server
$backup = '/path/to/backup';
$zip_file = $backup.'/backup.zip';

if ($handle = opendir($images))  
{
    $zip = new ZipArchive();

    if ($zip->open($zip_file, ZIPARCHIVE::CREATE)!==TRUE) 
    {
        exit("cannot open <$filename>\n");
    }

    while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) 
    {
        $zip->addFile($file);
        echo "$file\n";
    }
    closedir($handle);
    echo "numfiles: " . $zip->numFiles . "\n";
    echo "status:" . $zip->status . "\n";
    $zip->close();
    echo 'Zip File:'.$zip_file . "\n";
}

Answer 4

You can also use something like this:

exec('tar -czf backup.tar.gz /path/to/dir-to-be-backed-up/');