cerniera

A ZIP archive encoder that never copies your data.

Feed it file content through a Stream or write it directly with sendfile, mmap, or any I/O strategy you like - cerniera only encodes the ZIP framing around it.

ZIP64 records are written only where needed: entries over 4 GiB and archives with more than 65,535 entries are supported.

Cerniera (/tʃerˈnjɛːra/) is Italian for zipper.

Quick start

use std::{io, pin::pin};

use bytes::Bytes;
use cerniera::{FileTimes, MsDosDateTime, ZipEntry, ZipWriter};
use futures_util::{TryStreamExt, stream};
use tokio::{fs::File, io::AsyncWriteExt};

#[tokio::main(flavor = "current_thread")]
async fn main() -> io::Result<()> {
    let modified = FileTimes::new(
        MsDosDateTime::new(2026, 3, 10, 12, 30, 0).unwrap(),
        1_773_145_800, // same instant, seconds since 1970-01-01 UTC
    );

    let entries = stream::iter([
        Ok(ZipEntry::file(
            "hello.txt".try_into().unwrap(),
            modified,
            stream::iter([Ok::<_, io::Error>(Bytes::from_static(b"Hello, world!"))]),
        )
        .unwrap()),
        Ok(ZipEntry::directory("subdir/".try_into().unwrap(), modified).unwrap()),
    ]);

    let mut zip_stream = pin!(ZipWriter::new(entries));

    let mut file = File::create("output.zip").await?;
    while let Some(chunk) = zip_stream.try_next().await? {
        file.write_all(&chunk).await?;
    }
    Ok(())
}

Two API levels

ZipWriter - high-level streaming builder. Give it entries, get a byte stream. Handles CRC-32 and all ZIP bookkeeping automatically. Files are stored (uncompressed). Note that every entry's metadata is retained until the stream completes, and the central directory is then emitted as a single final chunk - bound the entry count when the entry list is untrusted.
ZipArchive - low-level, sans-IO encoder. Gives you full control over buffering and compression (DEFLATE, Zstandard, etc.) at the cost of a more manual lifecycle. See the deflate_zip and sendfile_zip examples.

Entry paths are validated on construction: ZipPath::new rejects traversal (..), absolute paths, drive letters, colons, backslashes, and NUL bytes, and the ZipEntry::file / ZipEntry::directory constructors enforce the file/directory slash convention - so untrusted names can be passed straight through the constructors.

That is shape validation, not a universal extraction guarantee: names like CON or report. are legal here but can still misbehave in permissive Windows extractors, and duplicate names are written as-is, leaving collision resolution to the extractor. Extraction safety ultimately depends on the reader that unpacks the archive.

Features

Feature	Default	Description
`std`	Yes	Enables runtime SIMD detection for faster CRC-32. Everything works without it.
`jiff`	No	Adds `TryFrom<jiff::civil::DateTime>` for `MsDosDateTime` and `TryFrom<jiff::Zoned>` for `FileTimes`.

License

Licensed under either of

Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution