Appending files to a zip file with Java

I am currently extracting the contents of a war file and then adding some new files to the directory structure and then creating a new war file.

This is all done programatically from Java - but I am wondering if it wouldn't be more efficient to copy the war file and then just append the files - then I wouldn't have to wait so long as the war expands and then has to be compressed again.

I can't seem to find a way to do this in the documentation though or any online examples.

Anyone can give some tips or pointers?

UPDATE:

TrueZip as mentioned in one of the answers seems to be a very good java library to append to a zip file (despite other answers that say it is not possible to do this).

Anyone have experience or feedback on TrueZip or can recommend other similar libaries?

In Java 7 we got Zip File System that allows adding and changing files in zip (jar, war) without manual repackaging.

We can directly write to files inside zip files as in the following example.

Map<String, String> env = new HashMap<>(); 
env.put("create", "true");
Path path = Paths.get("test.zip");
URI uri = URI.create("jar:" + path.toUri());
try (FileSystem fs = FileSystems.newFileSystem(uri, env))
{
    Path nf = fs.getPath("new.txt");
    try (Writer writer = Files.newBufferedWriter(nf, StandardCharsets.UTF_8, StandardOpenOption.CREATE)) {
        writer.write("hello");
    }
}

As others mentioned, it's not possible to append content to an existing zip (or war). However, it's possible to create a new zip on the fly without temporarily writing extracted content to disk. It's hard to guess how much faster this will be, but it's the fastest you can get (at least as far as I know) with standard Java. As mentioned by Carlos Tasada, SevenZipJBindings might squeeze out you some extra seconds, but porting this approach to SevenZipJBindings will still be faster than using temporary files with the same library.

Here's some code that writes the contents of an existing zip (war.zip) and appends an extra file (answer.txt) to a new zip (append.zip). All it takes is Java 5 or later, no extra libraries needed.

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.util.Enumeration;
import java.util.zip.ZipEntry;
import java.util.zip.ZipFile;
import java.util.zip.ZipOutputStream;

public class Main {

    // 4MB buffer
    private static final byte[] BUFFER = new byte[4096 * 1024];

    /**
     * copy input to output stream - available in several StreamUtils or Streams classes 
     */    
    public static void copy(InputStream input, OutputStream output) throws IOException {
        int bytesRead;
        while ((bytesRead = input.read(BUFFER))!= -1) {
            output.write(BUFFER, 0, bytesRead);
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        // read war.zip and write to append.zip
        ZipFile war = new ZipFile("war.zip");
        ZipOutputStream append = new ZipOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("append.zip"));

        // first, copy contents from existing war
        Enumeration<? extends ZipEntry> entries = war.entries();
        while (entries.hasMoreElements()) {
            ZipEntry e = entries.nextElement();
            System.out.println("copy: " + e.getName());
            append.putNextEntry(e);
            if (!e.isDirectory()) {
                copy(war.getInputStream(e), append);
            }
            append.closeEntry();
        }

        // now append some extra content
        ZipEntry e = new ZipEntry("answer.txt");
        System.out.println("append: " + e.getName());
        append.putNextEntry(e);
        append.write("42\n".getBytes());
        append.closeEntry();

        // close
        war.close();
        append.close();
    }
}