rars

A Rust implementation of RAR.

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rars is free software for compression, decompression and recovery of RAR archives. It supports all the archive types I could find - from the early RE~^ ones from the DOS days all the way through to RAR 7. It comes with a Rust library, a CLI, Python and TypeScript bindings.

It's a bit slower than WinRAR, it uses more memory and has slightly worse compression. It could probably use more testing, too. Other than that it's in pretty good shape.

Usage

The API is in the rars crate, which is used by the Python and TypeScript bindings. For the CLI, run:

cargo install rars-cli.

To inspect, test, and extract archives:

rars info archive.rar
rars test archive.rar
rars x archive.rar out/

To create archives with a specific RAR generation:

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, comments, RARVM filters, RAR5 quick-open records, recovery records and header encryption. There are a lot of things I won't list here, so run rars --help for more details.

Bindings

Python bindings are published to pypi, so you can pip install rars. To build locally, it's just python.

For JS it's built to WebAssembly and published to npm; npm install @bitplane/rars. It reads and writes in the browser and in Node, with no native module. To build locally, type just npm.