lzma-native

Provides bindings to the native liblzma library

Example usage:

The simplest possible usage:

var lzma = require('lzma-native');
var encoder = lzma.createStream();

process.stdin.pipe(encoder).pipe(process.stdout);

This mimicks the functionality of the xz command line util. Equivalently, one could have written

var encoder = lzma.createStream('easyEncoder', {preset: lzma.PRESET_DEFAULT, check: lzma.CHECK_CRC32})

or, for stronger and slower compression:

var encoder = lzma.createStream('easyEncoder', {preset: 9})

Here easyEncoder corresponds to the xz command line util, resp. its file format .xz. For the older .lzma format, you can just use aloneEncoder instead.

The API is loosely based on the native API, with a few bits of wrapper code added for convenience. Methods like stream.code and lzma.crc32 accept Node.js Buffers as arguments.

Unless you set .synchronous = true in createStreams second parameter, the library will use its own thread for compression (if compiled with support for that).

The encoder object here is an instance of stream.Duplex (see the Node.js docs), so you could also manually perform any of the write and read operations that you’re familiar with on it.

List of encoders/decoders and options

Encoders and decoders you probably are interested in:

• easyEncoder: Creates .xz files. Supports .preset and .check options.
• aloneEncoder: Creates .lzma files. Supports .preset and a bunch of very specific options (see the liblzma C headers for details)
• autoDecoder: Supports various flags. Detects input type automatically.

That is, the following is essentially (quite a slow version of) cat:

var encoder = lzma.createStream('easyEncoder');
var decoder = lzma.createStream('autoDecoder');

process.stdin.pipe(encoder).pipe(decoder).pipe(process.stdout);

If you know specifically what you want, you may also look into these encoders:

• rawDecoder: Supports .filters.
• rawEncoder: Supports .filters.
• streamEncoder: Supports .filters and .check.
• streamDecoder: Supports various flags.
• aloneDecoder: Supports various flags.

Also, all encoders accept a .memlimit option.

Installation

This package requires that you have the corresponding C library installed, e. g. via sudo apt-get install liblzma-dev or your equivalent of that. You can also download the source from the original author.

Once you have the library, npm install lzma-native will do.

You may also need a somewhat recent C++ compiler, and asynchronous compression support requires std::thread, which is included in C++11 (but is not essential for compiling).