Dirty hack to get gitlab archive download to use zip rather than tar.gz

gitlab-zip.rb

  def archive
    unless can?(current_user, :download_code, @project)
      render_404 and return
    end

    ref = params[:ref] || @project.root_ref
    commit = @project.commit(ref)
    render_404 and return unless commit

    # Build file path
    file_name = @project.code + "-" + commit.id.to_s + ".zip"
    storage_path = File.join(Rails.root, "tmp", "repositories", @project.code)
    file_path = File.join(storage_path, file_name)

    # Create file if not exists
    unless File.exists?(file_path)
      FileUtils.mkdir_p storage_path
      cmd = "git --git-dir='#{@project.path_to_repo}' archive --format=zip -o #{file_path} #{ref}"
      render_404 and return unless system(cmd)
    end

    # Send file to user
    send_file file_path
  end

Ah, thanks for letting me know. I'm on 2.6.2 right now. I haven't seen any better workarounds yet, although I'm sure there should be some.
Will test on 2.7 when I upgrade in a few weeks.

Cool, i'd love to know when you got that to work :)
I've been looking for other solutions the last 3 days and have not found anything but yours.
Sadly i have absolutely no experience with ruby so it'm not able to debug it or make any suggestions :(

Although this is like 2 years old, but there is an even quicker hack (as of GitLab 4.0.1) by editing archive_repo() in app/roles/repository.rb:

Change:
file_name = self.path + "-" + commit.id.to_s + ".tar.gz"
To:
file_name = self.path + "-" + commit.id.to_s + ".zip"

And change:
file = self.repo.archive_to_file(ref, prefix, file_path)
To:
file = self.repo.archive_to_file(ref, prefix, file_path, "zip", "cat")