Fastar

The fastar library wraps the Rust tar, flate2, and zstd crates, providing a high-performance way to work with compressed and uncompressed tar archives in Python.

Installation

pip install fastar

Usage

This section shows basic examples of how to create and extract tar archives using Fastar. For more usage examples, please refer directly to the test cases in the tests directory.

import fastar
from pathlib import Path


input_file = Path("file.txt")
input_file.write_text("Hello, Fastar!")


with fastar.open("archive.tar", "w") as archive:
    archive.append(input_file)


with fastar.open("archive.tar", "r") as archive:
    archive.unpack("output/")


unpacked_file = Path("output/file.txt")
print(unpacked_file.read_text())  # Hello, Fastar!

Opening Modes

The fastar.open method supports the following modes:

Mode	Action	Compression
"w"	Write	None
"w:gz"	Write	Gzip
"w:zst"	Write	Zstandard
"r"	Read	Automatically detected
"r:"	Read	None
"r:gz"	Read	Gzip
"r:zst"	Read	Zstandard

Development

1. Install dependencies into a virtual env: uv sync
2. Make changes to the code and tests
3. Build the package: uv run maturin develop
4. Run the tests: uv run pytest