php-ext-xz

PHP Extension providing XZ (LZMA2) compression and decompression, with support for one-shot encoding, incremental streaming, and file operations via stream wrapper.

The recommended way to install the extension is using pie:

pie install mateuszanella/php-ext-xz

This will download the source and compile the extension for your current PHP version. After installing the module, you may need to enable it in your php.ini file.

Add the following line to your php.ini configuration file:

extension=xz.so

You can also configure the default compression level and memory limit:

; Default compression level. Affects `xzencode` and `xzopen`,
; but only when the level was not specified. Default is 5.
xz.compression_level=5

; The maximum amount of memory that can be used when decompressing. Default is 0 (no limit).
xz.max_memory=65536

For detailed build and installation instructions from source, please see docs/BUILD.md.

You can easily compress and decompress strings.

$originalString = 'This is a test string that will be compressed and then decompressed.';

// Compress a string
$compressed = xzencode($originalString);

// Decompress a string
$decompressed = xzdecode($compressed);

// With explicit level and format (raw LZMA2 stream, no container)
$raw = xzencode($originalString, 6, XZ_FORMAT_RAW);

// With an explicit decoder memory limit
$decompressed = xzdecode($compressed, 64 * 1024 * 1024);

The extension also supports stream-based operations for working with .xz files.

$file = '/tmp/test.xz';

// Writing to an .xz file
$wh = xzopen($file, 'w');
xzwrite($wh, 'Data to write');
xzclose($wh);

// Reading from an .xz file and outputting its contents
$rh = xzopen($file, 'r');
xzpassthru($rh);
xzclose($rh);

For large data, network streams, or chunked processing, use the incremental API:

$ctx = xz_encode_init();
$out  = xz_encode_add($ctx, 'Hello, ');
$out .= xz_encode_add($ctx, 'World!');
$out .= xz_encode_finish($ctx);

$ctx = xz_decode_init();
$original = xz_decode_add($ctx, $out);

Besides the xz container, the incremental API can produce and consume bare LZMA1/LZMA2 streams (XZ_FORMAT_RAW). This is useful when the stream needs a custom container, for example embedding an archive. The "filter" option selects the codec, and xz_encode_get_properties() returns the codec property bytes:

$ctx = xz_encode_init(XZ_FORMAT_RAW, ['filter' => XZ_FILTER_LZMA2, 'dict_size' => 1 << 20]);
$packed  = xz_encode_add($ctx, $data);
$packed .= xz_encode_finish($ctx);
$props   = xz_encode_get_properties($ctx); // 1 byte for LZMA2, 5 for LZMA1

See docs/USAGE.md for the full API reference, constant tables, real-world wrapper patterns, and error handling details.

This repository is a fork from php-ext-xz by codemasher, originally forked from the RFC.

You can see the full list of contributors here.