Downloaded GitLab archive repository, using GitLab's API, appears to be corrupted

Question

I'm using cURL to download a repository from GitLab using their API. All this is done using PHP. Code bellow:

$zipResource = fopen('archive.zip', 'w');

$ch = curl_init("http://example.com/api/v3/projects");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("PRIVATE-TOKEN: private_token_goes_here"));

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://example.com/api/v3/projects/64/repository/archive");

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $zipResource);

curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

A brief overview: create an empty zip file. Connect to the server, get the archive and write it to the zip file.

The archive appears on the server, I can download it, and I can unzip it when I double-click it, all the files are there and everything seems to be in order.

However, when I try to unzip it using a terminal the following error pops up:

Archive:  archive.ZIP
  End-of-central-directory signature not found.  Either this file is not
  a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.  In the
  latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
  the last disk(s) of this archive.

What I've tried so far was:

Setting the headers as "Content-type: application/zip" . Setting the headers as "Content-Transfer-Encoding: Binary" (with the archive file type being in 'wb' //binary ) or "Content-type: application/octet-stream" and so on. The end-result was always the same, meaning I'd get the error mentioned above when trying to unzip the archive.

I can only assume that I'm either not using cURL properly, not setting the headers properly or there's something wrong with their API(highly unlikely).

Any nudging in the right direction is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem with Gitlab. Download as tar in my case works fine. I also found that the downloaded ZIP file actually contains all data, but is corrupted. The data from the ZIP file can still be recovered if Java is installed:

jar xvf corrupted-zip-file.zip

Answer 2

It's probably a GZipped TARball you're downloading. You should put the .zip extension at the end of the URL you're accessing.