How To Zip Files In Python

The aim of this page📝is to guide you through the creation of a compressed zip file by using the default zipfile module in Python (there are many other modules for compressing into other formats, of course)

1. STEPS

• important: by default, the module only stores and does not compress, this has to be explicitly set
• using this for small files (deployment logs) and therefore opting for the highest compression levels (performance considerations are a non-issue for me)
• to sum this, you need 4 args
• file_name.zip
• mode="w"
• compression method=ZIP_DEFLATED
• compression_level=9
• the bare-boned syntax you can test from the python REPL would be (I am compressing README.txt →example.zip)

from zipfile import ZIP_DEFLATED, ZipFile as zip
with zip("example.zip", mode="w",compression=ZIP_DEFLATED,compresslevel=9) as archive:
    archive.write("README.txt")

2. EXAMPLE

• the example is a particular function from a script that automates deployments and compresses output.txt into a filename containing information about a particular deployment (Jira card, deployed component, git user name of a deployer, timestamp) and also automatically pushes that to GitHub

3. LINKS

• https://realpython.com/python-zipfile/#creating-populating-and-extracting-your-own-zip-files
• compression — python zipfile module doesn’t seem to be compressing my files — Stack Overflow