How to create a zip archive of a directory in Python?

Question

How can I create a zip archive of a directory structure in Python?

Answer 1

Modern Python (3.6+) using the pathlib module for concise OOP-like handling of paths, and pathlib.Path.rglob() for recursive globbing. As far as I can tell, this is equivalent to George V. Reilly's answer: zips with compression, the topmost element is a directory, keeps empty dirs, uses relative paths.

from pathlib import Path
from zipfile import ZIP_DEFLATED, ZipFile

from os import PathLike
from typing import Union


def zip_dir(zip_name: str, source_dir: Union[str, PathLike]):
    src_path = Path(source_dir).expanduser().resolve(strict=True)
    with ZipFile(zip_name, 'w', ZIP_DEFLATED) as zf:
        for file in src_path.rglob('*'):
            zf.write(file, file.relative_to(src_path.parent))

Note: as optional type hints indicate, zip_name can't be a Path object (would be fixed in 3.6.2+).