How to create full compressed tar file using Python?
To build a .tar.gz (aka .tgz) for an entire directory tree:
import tarfileimport os.pathdef make_tarfile(output_filename, source_dir): with tarfile.open(output_filename, "w:gz") as tar: tar.add(source_dir, arcname=os.path.basename(source_dir))This will create a gzipped tar archive containing a single top-level folder with the same name and contents as source_dir.
import tarfiletar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz", "w:gz")for name in ["file1", "file2", "file3"]: tar.add(name)tar.close()If you want to create a tar.bz2 compressed file, just replace file extension name with ".tar.bz2" and "w:gz" with "w:bz2".
You call tarfile.open with mode='w:gz', meaning "Open for gzip compressed writing."
You'll probably want to end the filename (the name argument to open) with .tar.gz, but that doesn't affect compression abilities.
BTW, you usually get better compression with a mode of 'w:bz2', just like tar can usually compress even better with bzip2 than it can compress with gzip.