# Decompress archives

Robot: `/file/decompress`

🤖/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 <dfn>Robot</dfn> 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 <dfn>Assembly</dfn> to fail.

Password-protected archives (ZIP with ZipCrypto or AES encryption, RAR encrypted, 7z with AES-256) are supported via the `password` parameter.

Stage: ga

## Usage example

Decompress an uploaded archive:

```json
{
  "steps": {
    "decompressed": {
      "robot": "/file/decompress",
      "use": ":original"
    }
  }
}
```

## Parameters

* `interpolate`: Controls whether Assembly Variables are interpolated for individual instruction fields.

  By default, most Robot instruction fields interpolate Assembly Variables. Set this to `false` to treat every instruction field as literal text, or set an individual field path to `false` to treat only that field as literal text. For Robot-specific fields that are literal by default, set this to `true` or set that field path to `true` to opt back into interpolation.

  Use field names such as `path`, or dotted paths such as `ffmpeg.vf` for nested objects.

* `output_meta`: 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": true` in this object to extract if the image contains transparent parts and `"dominant_colors": true` to extract an array of hexadecimal color codes from the image.

  For images, you can also add `"blurhash": true` to extract a [BlurHash](https://blurha.sh) 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": true` parameter to extract the colorspace of the output video.

  For videos, you can also add `"interlaced": true` to detect whether the video is interlaced. This combines the cheap ffprobe `field_order` flag with a bounded `idet` sampling pass over the first frames of the source, exposing `interlaced`, `field_order`, and a diagnostic `interlace_detection` object under `file.meta`. This is computationally expensive and billed accordingly.

  For audio, you can add `"mean_volume": true` to get a single value representing the mean average volume of the audio file.

  You can also set this to `false` to skip metadata extraction and speed up transcoding.

* `user_meta`: Adds custom metadata to each file emitted by this Robot without modifying the file’s contents.

  The values are merged with any existing `user_meta` carried 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}" }`.

* `result`: Whether the results of this Step should be present in the Assembly Status JSON

* `queue`: Setting 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_accept`: Force a Robot to accept a file type it would have ignored.

  By default, Robots ignore files they are not familiar with.
  [🤖/video/encode](/docs/robots/video-encode.md), for
  example, will happily ignore input images.

  With the `force_accept` parameter set to `true`, 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_errors`: 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 `true` is 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.

* `use`: Specifies 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:
    ```json
    {
      "use": [
        ":original",
        "encoded",
        "resized"
      ]
    }
    ```
  * You can also tag input Steps with `as` to pass semantic intent to robots:
    ```json
    {
      "use": [
        {
          "name": ":original",
          "as": "image"
        },
        {
          "name": ":original",
          "as": "mask"
        }
      ]
    }
    ```

  > [!Tip]
  > That's likely all you need to know about `use`, but you can view [Advanced use cases](/docs/topics/use-parameter.md).

* `password`: The 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 <dfn>Assembly</dfn> will fail with a `FILE_DECOMPRESS_PASSWORD_REQUIRED` or `FILE_DECOMPRESS_PASSWORD_INCORRECT` error.

* `turbo`: Enables Turbo Mode for `/file/decompress`.

  This setting defaults to `true`. Set it to `false` to 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).