Python zipfile recursive write

July 27, 2020

This function recursively zips files in directories, storing only the relative path due to the use of the “arcname” parameter. Otherwise, you get the path relative to the root of your filesystem, which is rarely useful.

import zipfile
from pathlib import Path


def zip_dirs(path: Path, pattern: str) -> T.List[Path]:
    """
    recursively .zip a directory
    """

    path = Path(path).expanduser().resolve()

    dlist = [d for d in path.glob(pattern) if d.is_dir()]
    if len(dlist) == 0:
        raise FileNotFoundError(f"no directories to zip under {path} with {pattern}")

    for d in dlist:
        zip_name = d.with_suffix(".zip")
        with zipfile.ZipFile(zip_name, mode="w", compression=zipfile.ZIP_LZMA) as z:
            for root, _, files in os.walk(d):
                for file in files:
                    fn = Path(root, file)
                    afn = fn.relative_to(path)
                    z.write(fn, arcname=afn)
        print("write", zip_name)