Code to create a password encrypted zip file?

To create encrypted zip archive (named 'myarchive.zip') using open-source 7-Zip utility:

rc = subprocess.call(['7z', 'a', '-pP4$$W0rd', '-y', 'myarchive.zip'] + 
                     ['first_file.txt', 'second.file'])

To install 7-Zip, type:

$ sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

To unzip by hand (to demonstrate compatibility with zip utitity), type:

$ unzip myarchive.zip

And enter P4$$W0rd at the prompt.

Or the same in Python 2.6+:

>>> zipfile.ZipFile('myarchive.zip').extractall(pwd='P4$$W0rd')

Extraction is pretty easy, you just use zipfile.ZipFile.setpassword() which was introduced in python 2.6, however the standard python library lacks support for creating encrypted zip files.

There are commercially available libraries for Python which supports creation of encrypted and password protected zip files. If you want to use something freely available, you need to use the standard zip command line utility.

zip -e -Ppassword filename.zip fileA fileB ...

Actually setpassword("yourpassword") is only valid for extracting, not for creating a zip file.

The solution (not to my liking):

How to create an encrypted ZIP file?

If Python is not a must and you can use system utilities, tools like zip or rar provides password encrypted compression. zip with -e option, and rar with -p.