What is the Python code to create a password encrypted zip file?  I'm fine with using some apt-get'able utilities using system on the command line.
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 ...
Code to create a password encrypted zip file?