Swift-tar: A pure Swift TAR archive read/write/extract library

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I wrote a TAR reader/writer in Swift.

swift-tar is a pure Swift library for reading, writing, and extracting TAR archives.

  • Foundation-free - works without Foundation or any system framework
  • Cross-platform - macOS, Linux, Windows, WebAssembly, Embedded Swift
  • GNU & PAX extensions - transparent handling of long paths, long link names, and PAX extended headers

If you already have the whole archive in memory, the basic API is small:

import Tar

let archive = Archive(data: archiveBytes)

for entry in archive {
    let path = entry.fields.path()
    let size = entry.fields.size
    print("\(path) (\(size) bytes)")
}

For larger inputs, there is also a streaming reader and streaming extractor:

import Tar

var reader = TarReader()
var extractor = try TarExtractor().streamingExtractor(to: "output")

for chunk in chunks {
    try extractor.consume(reader.append(chunk))
}

try extractor.consume(reader.finish())
let result = try extractor.finish()
print("Extracted \(result.extractedEntries) entries")

In one local benchmark, extracting the 3.5 GB swift-6.3-RELEASE-ubuntu24.04.tar archive on macOS was slightly faster than bsdtar in this setup.

The repo is here: https://github.com/kateinoigakukun/swift-tar
MIT licensed.

Feedback and any use case ideas are welcome.

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Swift for Wasm April 2026 Updates
2

Thank you! This is excellent for our use cases!

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