Intro

Have you ever wanted to tar something, but you didn't want to push it to your server first?

Tar-js is here to the rescue!!

With tar-js, you can construct a tar archive in the browser. This is basically a port of tar-async for Nodejs for the browser, with a couple differences.

Here's what it supports:

• Add strings to a tar archive as files
• Customizable uid, gid, mtime, and permissions (defaults work well though too)
• Add files in a directory heirarchy

Dependencies

Tar needs an HTML5 compliant browser. More specifically it needs Uint8Array to work.

The only external module is require-kiss, which makes browser JS much more Node-like.

This module can be installed from npm (npm install require-kiss) or directly downloaded from github (https://github.com/coolaj86/require-kiss-js).

Usage Guide

In your HTML file, make sure that require-kiss is included first. Then, to use it, do something like this:

var Tar = require('tar-js'),
    tape = new Tar();

Then all you got to do is call tape.append with your params and it'll be added to the archive. That's it!

Here's the api for append: append(filepath, content, [opts], [callback])

• filepath- string path (can include directories and such)
• content- string or Uint8Array
• opts- options:
  • mode- permissions of resulting file (octet) [default: 777]
  • mtime- modification time in seconds (integer) [default: current time]
  • uid- user id (integer) [default: 0]
  • gid- group id (integer) [default: 0]
• callback- callback when done (takes a Uint8Array as it's only parameter)
  • This is a reference to the tar so far
  • Copy it if you want to use it, because subsequent adds may break stuff