Zipping a directory

Archive files are a good way to distribute whole directories as if they were a single file and to reduce the size of the distributed files.

Python has built-in support for creating ZIP archive files, which can be leveraged to compress a whole directory.

How to do it...

The steps for this recipes are as follows:

1. The zipfile module allows us to create compressed ZIP archives made up of multiple files:

import zipfile
import os

def zipdir(archive_name, directory):
    with zipfile.ZipFile(
        archive_name, 'w', compression=zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED
    ) as archive:
        for root, dirs, files in os.walk(directory):
            for filename in files:
                abspath = os.path.join(root, filename)
                relpath = os.path.relpath(abspath, directory)
                archive.write(abspath, relpath)        

2. Using zipdir is as simple as providing a name for the .zip file that should be created and a path for the directory that should be archived:

zipdir('/tmp/test...