libzip
A C library for reading, creating, and modifying zip archives.
Why Use libzip?
libzip has been continuously developed since 2005. It is efficient, small, and flexible. It is usable on Linux, macOS, Windows, and many other operating systems.
The main design criteria are:
- Maintain a stable API without breaking backwards compatibility.
- Do not create corrupt files, even in case of errors.
- Do not lose data.
- Be efficient.
It supports the following features:
- reading archives and file data from files or memory buffers
- reverting unsaved changes
- support for Zip64 large archives
- deflate, bzip2, LZMA, and zstd compression
- Winzip AES and legacy PKWARE encryption
The BSD license used for libzip allows its use in commercial products.
Who Uses libzip?
libzip is used in major open source projects like KDE, Chromium, ImageMagick, and VeraCrypt.
Commercial products using libzip include Lightroom from Adobe and the Kobo eReader.
There are also bindings for other programming languages: Python, Ruby, Lua, PHP, and others.
There is a more complete list of projects using libzip.
Getting Started
Most Linux and other Unix distributions include libzip in their package distributions, it is usually called libzip or libzip-dev.
On macOS, it is included in both Homebrew and Mac Ports.
On Windows, it is in vcpkg.
A list of available packages can be found on Repology.
For building and installing libzip from source, see the build instructions.
Using libzip
libzip is fully documented via man pages. HTML versions of the man pages are in the Reference section. Example source code is in the examples and src subdirectories.
If you have developed an application using libzip, you can find out about API changes and how to adapt your code for them in API Changes.
Staying in Touch
The official repository is at GitHub. You can submit bug reports and feature requests via the issue tracker, or submit pull requests as well.
If you have questions about using libzip, you can use the discussions.
If you want to reach the authors in private, use info@libzip.org.
Current version is 1.11.4, released on May 23, 2025.
