Decompress archives
🤖/file/decompress extracts entire archives of files to be consumed by other Robots or exported as individual files.

This Robot supports the following archive formats:
- ZIP archives (with uncompressed or "deflate"-compressed entries, including password-protected)
- 7-Zip archives (including AES-256 encrypted)
- RAR archives (including encrypted)
- GNU tar format (including GNU long filenames, long link names, and sparse files)
- Solaris 9 extended tar format (including ACLs)
- Old V7 tar archives
- POSIX ustar
- POSIX pax interchange format
- POSIX octet-oriented cpio
- SVR4 ASCII cpio
- Binary cpio (big-endian or little-endian)
- ISO9660 CD-ROM images (with optional Rockridge or Joliet extensions)
- GNU and BSD "ar" archives
- "mtree" format
- Microsoft CAB format
- LHA and LZH archives
- XAR archives
This Robot also detects and handles any of the following before evaluating the archive file:
- uuencoded files
- Files with RPM wrapper
- gzip compression
- bzip2 compression
- compress/LZW compression
- lzma, lzip, and xz compression
For security reasons, archives containing symlinks that point outside the archived directory will cause the Assembly to fail.
Password-protected archives (ZIP with ZipCrypto or AES encryption, RAR encrypted, 7z with AES-256) are supported via the password parameter.
Usage example
Decompress an uploaded archive:
{
"steps": {
"decompressed": {
"robot": "/file/decompress",
"use": ":original"
}
}
}Parameters
interpolateboolean | Record<string, boolean>Controls whether Assembly Variables are interpolated for individual instruction fields.
By default, most Robot instruction fields interpolate Assembly Variables. Set this to
falseto treat every instruction field as literal text, or set an individual field path tofalseto treat only that field as literal text. For Robot-specific fields that are literal by default, set this totrueor set that field path totrueto opt back into interpolation.Use field names such as
path, or dotted paths such asffmpeg.vffor nested objects.output_metaRecord<string, boolean> | boolean | Array<string>Allows you to specify a set of metadata that is more expensive on CPU power to calculate, and thus is disabled by default to keep your Assemblies processing fast.
For images, you can add
"has_transparency": truein this object to extract if the image contains transparent parts and"dominant_colors": trueto extract an array of hexadecimal color codes from the image.For images, you can also add
"blurhash": trueto extract a BlurHash string — a compact representation of a placeholder for the image, useful for showing a blurred preview while the full image loads.For videos, you can add the
"colorspace": trueparameter to extract the colorspace of the output video.For videos, you can also add
"interlaced": trueto detect whether the video is interlaced. This combines the cheap ffprobefield_orderflag with a boundedidetsampling pass over the first frames of the source, exposinginterlaced,field_order, and a diagnosticinterlace_detectionobject underfile.meta. This is computationally expensive and billed accordingly.For audio, you can add
"mean_volume": trueto get a single value representing the mean average volume of the audio file.You can also set this to
falseto skip metadata extraction and speed up transcoding.user_metaRecord<string, any>(default:{})Adds custom metadata to each file emitted by this Robot without modifying the file’s contents.
The values are merged with any existing
user_metacarried by the input file. If both objects contain the same key, this Robot’s value takes precedence. Assembly Variables are supported, for example{ "internal_file_id": "${file.id}" }.resultboolean(default:false)Whether the results of this Step should be present in the Assembly Status JSON
queuebatchSetting the queue to 'batch', manually downgrades the priority of jobs for this step to avoid consuming Priority job slots for jobs that don't need zero queue waiting times
force_acceptboolean(default:false)Force a Robot to accept a file type it would have ignored.
By default, Robots ignore files they are not familiar with. 🤖/video/encode, for example, will happily ignore input images.
With the
force_acceptparameter set totrue, you can force Robots to accept all files thrown at them. This will typically lead to errors and should only be used for debugging or combatting edge cases.ignore_errorsboolean | Array<meta | execute>(default:[])Ignore errors during specific phases of processing.
Setting this to
["meta"]will cause the Robot to ignore errors during metadata extraction.Setting this to
["execute"]will cause the Robot to ignore errors during the main execution phase.Setting this to
trueis equivalent to["meta", "execute"]and will ignore errors in both phases.Metadata extraction can fail for files inside an archive, for example when an archived file has a size of zero bytes. Configure the
"meta"phase when decompression should continue in that case.usestring | Array<string> | Array<object> | objectSpecifies which Step(s) to use as input.
- You can pick any names for Steps except
":original"(reserved for user uploads handled by Transloadit) - You can provide several Steps as input with arrays:
{ "use": [ ":original", "encoded", "resized" ] } - You can also tag input Steps with
asto pass semantic intent to robots:{ "use": [ { "name": ":original", "as": "image" }, { "name": ":original", "as": "mask" } ] }
TipThat's likely all you need to know about
use, but you can view Advanced use cases.- You can pick any names for Steps except
passwordstringThe password to use for decrypting password-protected archives.
Supports encrypted ZIP (ZipCrypto and AES), RAR (encrypted), and 7z (AES-256 encrypted) archives.
For security, this value should be passed via Template Variables (
${fields.archive_password}) or Template Credentials rather than hardcoded in your Assembly Instructions. The password is never logged or included in Assembly status responses.If the archive is encrypted and no password is provided, or if the password is incorrect, the Assembly will fail with a
FILE_DECOMPRESS_PASSWORD_REQUIREDorFILE_DECOMPRESS_PASSWORD_INCORRECTerror.turboboolean(default:true)Enables Turbo Mode for
/file/decompress.This setting defaults to
true. Set it tofalseto disable Turbo Mode.When enabled, extracted files are emitted as soon as they are available, which can speed up downstream processing for large archives.
Turbo Mode also changes usage accounting: emitted extracted-file bytes and original input-archive bytes are billed with a surcharge (25% by default).