How do I decompress a hosted tar file on the fly using NodeJS

March 31, 2022

I have the following curl command that works fine…

curl -L -v "https://us-central1-npm.pkg.dev/my-project/npm-public/@my-scope/bucky-barnes/-/@my-scope/bucky-barnes-0.0.1.tgz" -o test.tgz

This outputs a test.tgz file I can decompress.

I am trying to automate this using NodeJS (mind the -L for redirect). I came up with the following…

import express from "express";
import tar from "tar-stream";
import https from "https";
const app = express();
const PORT = 3000;

const request = function(req, res, url) {
  const reqSent = https.get(url, (response) => {
    if (response.statusCode == 302 || response.statusCode == 307) {
      const url = `https://${reqSent.host}${response.headers.location}`;
      console.log("Redirecting ", url);
      request(req, res, url);
    } else {
      console.log("Extracting ", reqSent.host);
      const extract = tar.extract()
      extract.on('entry', function(header, stream, next) {
        console.log(`The filename is ${header.name}`)
        stream.on('end', function() {
          next() // ready for next entry
        })
        stream.resume() // just auto drain the stream
      })
      extract.on("error", (e)=>{
        res.status(500).send(`Error decompressing ${e}`)
      })
      extract.on('finish', function() {
        res.send("Completed")
      })
      response.pipe(extract);
    };
  } ).on("error", (e)=>{
    console.log(`There was an error ${e}`);
    res.status(500).send("Failed");
  });
};

app.use((req, res)=>{
  request(req, res, "https://us-central1-npm.pkg.dev/my-project/npm-public/@my-scope/bucky-barnes/-/@my-scope/bucky-barnes-0.0.1.tgz")
});
app.listen(PORT, () => console.log(`Server listening on port: ${PORT}`));

When I run it fails saying that the tar-streamer can’t parse the response…