As a new developer of Silex/Symfony, I found excited some components available to use with Silex and Symfony. Today I want to talk about Guzzle and Zippy; I am going to show you how to use both to download and handle remote zip/gzip files in your application.

Installing with Composer.

Firstly, we need to add the dependency in our composer.json file as you can see in the following snippet.

{
    "require": {
        "guzzlehttp/guzzle": "~6.1.1",
        "alchemy/zippy": "0.2.*@dev"
    }
}

After including these new dependencies you must to run the composer update as you can see in the following bash sentence.

$ composer update

Usage

With those new vendors, you only need to use them, as you can see in the following code.

<?php

use Alchemy\Zippy\Zippy;
use GuzzleHttp\Client;
use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Filesystem;
use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Exception\IOExceptionInterface;

Now inside any method of your class is possible to request to create a client of Guzzle, in general terms, Guzzle is like a headless browser.

$client =  new Client();

// Destination file to download the release
$destination = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), 'file.') . "tar.gz";

// Get and save file
$client->get($remote_zip_file_path, ['save_to' => $destination]);

// Handle Zip file to extract in your system
$zippy = Zippy::load();
$archive = $zippy->open($destination);
$archive->extract('./');

try {
  $fs = new Filesystem();
  $fs->rename($remote_zip_file_name, './' . $new_folder_name);
} catch (IOExceptionInterface $e) {
  print 'Error renaming folder';
}

In the code above we are assuming, we have the path to file and the name, and we want to rename the folder after extract, the code also could be improved include a try-catch section for extract process.

As you can see is CURL handles a complex task like that normally but as you can see Guzzle is more powerful and his implementation is easier to understand.

Drupal usage.

Because now Drupal 8 includes several Symfony components and other useful components, the code above could be rewritten using Drupal 8 wrapper, let me show you the implementation.

use Drupal\Core\Archiver\ArchiveTar;
use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Filesystem;
use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Exception\IOExceptionInterface;

$client =  new Drupal::httpClient();

// Destination file to download the release
$destination = tempnam(sys_get_temp_dir(), 'file.') . "tar.gz";

// Get and save file
$client->get($remote_zip_file_path, ['save_to' => $destination]);

// Handle Zip file to extract in your system
$archiver = new ArchiveTar($destination, 'gz');
$archiver->extract('./');
fclose($destination . '.tar.gz');

try {
  $fs = new Filesystem();
  $fs->rename($remote_zip_file_name, './' . $new_folder_name);
} catch (IOExceptionInterface $e) {
  print 'Error renaming folder';
}

As you can see is similar, and we don’t have to modify the Drupal 8 composer.json file, to include components because they are already included in Drupal 8 core.

If you want to check a complete implementation of this logic, you can check the source code of Drupal Console project commands module:download and site:new

I hope you found this article useful.