How to create Tar File in ASP.NET 7?

Today, we will explore the process of creating a tar file in ASP.NET 7, which is a novel feature of this framework. Let's delve into this topic by following an example.

Initially, we need to open Visual Studio, where we already have a console application. In the program.cs file, we will add a reference to System.Formats.Tar to access the TarFile class, which contains two useful methods: CreateFromDirectory and ExtractToDirectory.

Let's begin with CreateFromDirectory method, which necessitates three parameters, namely sourceDirectoryName, destination, and includeBaseDirectory. The sourceDirectoryName parameter specifies the directory path that we want to transform into a tar file. Destination parameter indicates where we want to save the tar file. The includeBaseDirectory parameter can be set to true or false; we choose true if we wish to include the root folder; otherwise, we choose false.

After passing all the necessary parameters to the function, we create two folders named source and destination on our local system. We also create two notepad files in the source folder. The source folder is employed as the source of our tar file, and the destination folder is used to extract the tar file.

After running the program, a demo tar file will be generated. We can extract this tar file by using the ExtractToDirectory method, which also requires three parameters, including sourceFileName, destinationDirectoryName, and overwriteFiles. Here, sourceFileName is the path and name of the tar file. The destinationDirectoryName specifies where the extracted files or folder will be located. OverwriteFiles parameter can be set to true or false, depending on whether we want to overwrite the files or folder.