Compressing directory using shutil.make_archive() while preserving directory structure

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Using the terms in the documentation, you have specified a root_dir, but not a base_dir. Try specifying the base_dir like so:

shutil.make_archive('/home/code/test_dicoms',
                    'zip',
                    '/home/code/',
                    'test_dicoms')

To answer your second question, it depends upon the version of Python you are using. Starting from Python 3.4, ZIP64 extensions will be availble by default. Prior to Python 3.4, make_archive will not automatically create a file with ZIP64 extensions. If you are using an older version of Python and want ZIP64, you can invoke the underlying zipfile.ZipFile() directly.

If you choose to use zipfile.ZipFile() directly, bypassing shutil.make_archive(), here is an example:

import zipfile
import os

d = '/home/code/test_dicoms'

os.chdir(os.path.dirname(d))
with zipfile.ZipFile(d + '.zip',
                     "w",
                     zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED,
                     allowZip64=True) as zf:
    for root, _, filenames in os.walk(os.path.basename(d)):
        for name in filenames:
            name = os.path.join(root, name)
            name = os.path.normpath(name)
            zf.write(name, name)

Reference:

  • https://docs.python.org/library/shutil.html#shutil.make_archive
  • https://docs.python.org/library/zipfile.html#zipfile-objects

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