# rars
A Rust implementation of RAR.
* [🏠 home](https://bitplane.net/dev/rust/rars)
* [🪵 blog](https://bitplane.net/log/2026/05/rars/)
* [🦀 crate](https://crates.io/crates/rars)
* [🐱 source](https://github.com/bitplane/rars)
* [📃 spec](https://github.com/bitplane/rar-research)
## Current Status
`rars` covers the RAR lineage from early `RE~^` archives through RAR 7,
compression and decompression. It's getting faster, and kinda works.
## Rust API
Use the `rars` crate for Rust applications and libraries. Since 0.4, the
lower-level `rars-format`, `rars-codec`, `rars-crypto`, `rars-crc32`, and
`rars-recovery` crates are folded into `rars`; those standalone crates ended at
0.3.x. Applications should depend on `rars`, and command-line installs should
use `rars-cli`.
## CLI
Inspect, test, and extract archives:
```sh
rars info archive.rar
rars test archive.rar
rars x archive.rar out/
```
Create archives with specific RAR generation:
```sh
rars a --format rar29 archive.rar files...
rars a --format rar50 --solid --auto-filter archive.rar files...
rars a --format rar70 --store --volume-size 10m archive.part1.rar files...
```
The writer supports stored and compressed members, split volumes, passwords,
header encryption where implemented, comments, RARVM filters, RAR5 quick-open
records, and supported recovery records. Run `rars --help` for more info.
By default, `--memory-limit` is set to 256MB and the number of `--threads` is
your core count. This might limit compression on machines with lots of CPU
cores; experiment and override as required.
## Python bindings
Python bindings are published to [pypi](https://pypi.org/project/rars/), so you
can `pip install rars`. To build locally, it's `maturin develop`.
## Development
Run the test suite:
```sh
cargo test --workspace --all-targets
```
Generate a local coverage report:
```sh
rustup component add llvm-tools-preview
./scripts/coverage.py
```
The script prints a line-coverage summary, saves it to
`target/coverage/summary.txt`, and writes HTML output to
`target/coverage/html/library/index.html` and `target/coverage/html/cli/index.html`.