How to ZIP files with PHP

Most web servers these days run on a LAMP configuration (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Because the Operating System is Linux, the default archival and compression utilities are TAR and GZIP resulting in files like “filename.tar.gz”. There is nothing wrong with these utilities, however, if you are providing a visitor to your web site with a dynamic download of archived files you would probably want to provide the files in the very well known compressed format (typically used on Windows OS computers).