The goal is to:
- Create a file read stream.
- Pipe it to gzip (
zlib.createGzip()
)
Then pipe the read stream of zlib output to:
1) HTTP response
object
2) and writable file stream to save the gzipped output.
Now I can do down to 3.1:
var gzip = zlib.createGzip(),
sourceFileStream = fs.createReadStream(sourceFilePath),
targetFileStream = fs.createWriteStream(targetFilePath);
response.setHeader('Content-Encoding', 'gzip');
sourceFileStream.pipe(gzip).pipe(response);
... which works fine, but I need to also save the gzipped data to a file so that I don't need to regzip every time and be able to directly stream the gzipped data as a response.
So how do I pipe one readable stream into two writable streams at once in Node?
Would sourceFileStream.pipe(gzip).pipe(response).pipe(targetFileStream);
work in Node 0.8.x?
Pipe chaining/splitting doesn't work like you're trying to do here, sending the first to two different subsequent steps:
sourceFileStream.pipe(gzip).pipe(response);
However, you can pipe the same readable stream into two writeable streams, eg:
var fs = require('fs');
var source = fs.createReadStream('source.txt');
var dest1 = fs.createWriteStream('dest1.txt');
var dest2 = fs.createWriteStream('dest2.txt');
source.pipe(dest1);
source.pipe(dest2);
I found that zlib returns a readable stream which can be later piped into multiple other streams. So I did the following to solve the above problem:
var sourceFileStream = fs.createReadStream(sourceFile);
// Even though we could chain like
// sourceFileStream.pipe(zlib.createGzip()).pipe(response);
// we need a stream with a gzipped data to pipe to two
// other streams.
var gzip = sourceFileStream.pipe(zlib.createGzip());
// This will pipe the gzipped data to response object
// and automatically close the response object.
gzip.pipe(response);
// Then I can pipe the gzipped data to a file.
gzip.pipe(fs.createWriteStream(targetFilePath));