A tarball is an archive of files created with the tar (tape archive) utility. Source-code distributions have been packaged as tarballs since the mid 1980s, even though the term's usage did not become commonplace until the late 1990s.

A tarball usually has the extension .tgz or .tar.gz, because of the way they are generated:

1. use tar command to pack all files. This does not compress the files.
2. use gzip command to compress the complete tar archive