# rars
A Rust implementation of RAR.
* 🏠 [home](https://bitplane.net/dev/rust/rars)
* 🪵 [blog](https://bitplane.net/log/2026/05/rars/)
* 📦 [downloads](https://github.com/bitplane/rars/releases)
* 🦀 [crates](https://crates.io/crates/rars)
* 🐍 [pypi](https://pypi.org/project/rars)
* 📜 [npm](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bitplane/rars)
* 🐱 [source](https://github.com/bitplane/rars)
* 📃 [spec](https://github.com/bitplane/rar-research)
`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:
```sh
rars info archive.rar
rars test archive.rar
rars x archive.rar out/
```
To create archives with a 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,
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](https://pypi.org/project/rars/), so you
can `pip install rars`. To build locally, it's `just python`.
For JS it's built to WebAssembly and published to
[npm](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bitplane/rars);
`npm install @bitplane/rars`. It reads and writes in the browser and in Node,
with no native module. To build locally, type `just npm`.