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What is the correct MIME type for a tar.gz file?
I've searched around and found several values being used, including:
application/x-gzip
application/x-gtar
application/x-tgz
But I could find no indication as to which of these (if any) was the correct or canonical value.
As of August 2012, the MIME type recommended in RFC 6713 is application/gzip.
According to the IANA registry, tar is not an official media type, so a GZipped tar file is officially only a compressed file.
Hypothetically, if a tarball were an official media type and following conventions, its MIME type would be application/tar (file extension .tar) and its compressed version would be application/tar+gzip (file extensions .tar.gz and .tgz).
application/zip is a different format than application/gzip and tar.gz is a gzipped tarball; Zip uses multiple compression methods, not all of which are freely licensed. Perhaps you got lucky and your decompression library recognizes both formats from their data stream.
– Suncat2000
Mar 7 '17 at 16:58
tar is not an official media type, would that not make application/x-tar+gzip the most correct? I feel that would be more clear even if it's less... official.
– Will S
Jul 9 '18 at 12:56
Although most are deprecated, they are all technically correct, just different MIME types.
The correct MIME type is application/x-gzip according to cPanel standards.
application/x-gzip, It got corrupted. But when I used application/gzip , it worked.
– Amit Kumar Gupta
Dec 4 '16 at 16:15
application/x-gzip and application/tar+gzip produced corrupted files, whereas application/gzip worked.
– ctenar
Feb 19 at 7:29
