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, and 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 delete data.
- Be efficient.
It supports the following features:
- Reading archives and file data from files or memory buffers
- Reverting unsaved changes
- 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.
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 INSTALL file.
Using libzip
libzip is fully documented via man pages. HTML versions of the man pages are on libzip.org and in the man directory. You can start with libzip(3), which lists all others. 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 the included file API-CHANGES.
Staying in Touch
More information and the latest version can always be found on libzip.org. The official repository is at GitHub.
If you want to reach the authors in private, use info@libzip.org.
Current version is 1.11.4, released on May 23, 2025.
