How to create full compressed tar file using Python?

Question

To build a .tar.gz (aka .tgz) for an entire directory tree:

import tarfile
import os.path

def 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 tarfile
tar = 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.

Previous answers advise using the tarfile Python module for creating a .tar.gz file in Python. That's obviously a good and Python-style solution, but it has serious drawback in speed of the archiving. This question mentions that tarfile is approximately two times slower than the tar utility in Linux. According to my experience this estimation is pretty correct.

So for faster archiving you can use the tar command using subprocess module:

subprocess.call(['tar', '-czf', output_filename, file_to_archive])