The code to compress a folder in to tar file is:

import tarfile

tar = tarfile.open("TarName.tar.gz", "w:gz")
tar.add("folder/location", arcname="TarName")
tar.close()

It works for me. Hope that works for you too.

There is a module gzip. Usage:

Example of how to create a compressed GZIP file:

import gzip
content = b"Lots of content here"
f = gzip.open('/home/joe/file.txt.gz', 'wb')
f.write(content)
f.close()

Example of how to GZIP compress an existing file:

import gzip
f_in = open('/home/joe/file.txt')
f_out = gzip.open('/home/joe/file.txt.gz', 'wb')
f_out.writelines(f_in)
f_out.close()
f_in.close()

EDIT:

Jace Browning's answer using with in Python >= 2.7 is obviously more terse and readable, so my second snippet would (and should) look like:

import gzip
with open('/home/joe/file.txt', 'rb') as f_in, gzip.open('/home/joe/file.txt.gz', 'wb') as f_out:
    f_out.writelines(f_in)

I believe that's because gzip never operates over directories, it acts as a compression algorithm unlike zip and tar where we could compress directories. python's implementation of gzip is to operate on files. However recursive traversal of a directory tree is easy if we look at the os.walk call.

(I haven't tested this)

def gunzip(file_path,output_path):
    with gzip.open(file_path,"rb") as f_in, open(output_path,"wb") as f_out:
        shutil.copyfileobj(f_in, f_out)

def recurse_and_gunzip(root):
    walker = os.walk(root)
    for root,dirs,files in walker:
        for f in files:
            if fnmatch.fnmatch(f,"*.gz"):
                gunzip(f,f.replace(".gz",""))

It looks like you will have to use GzipFile directly:

import gzip
content = "Lots of content here"
real_f = open('/home/joe/file.txt.gz', 'wb')
f = gzip.GZipFile('file.txt.gz', fileobj=real_f)
f.write(content)
f.close()
real_f.close()

It looks like open doesn't allow you to specify the fileobj separate from the filename.