ziplark

Project Overview

Ziplark is a free, fast, cross-platform archiver powered by a single small Rust engine. It extracts ZIP, RAR (including RAR5), 7z, tar, ISO and the common compressed-tar variants, and creates ZIP (with AES-256 support), 7z and tar archives. The same engine is driven three ways: a desktop app, a command-line tool and an MCP server, and the desktop app lets you drag an archive onto the window to inspect and extract it.

One small engine, three ways to drive it, covering everyday compression and extraction needs.

Key Features

• Format support: extracts ZIP, RAR/RAR5, 7z, tar, tar.gz/bz2/xz/zst/lz4, single-stream compressed files and ISO disc images
• Archive creation: creates ZIP (AES-256), 7z (AES-256), tar and various compressed tars
• Volumes and SFX: opens multi-volume sets such as .part03.rar completely and reads .exe self-extracting archives
• Damage tolerance: --keep-broken (Extract what is readable in the app) recovers every intact file from a damaged or incomplete archive
• Integrity verification: verification decompresses each entry and discards the bytes without writing any file, reporting every broken entry
• Context-menu integration: adds Extract here with Ziplark and Compress to ZIP with Ziplark to the file manager
• MCP server: a JSON-RPC over stdio server for LLM clients, with read and write tools separated and paged listing

Target Audience

• Everyday desktop users who handle many archive formats
• Developers and operators who want to batch extract or pack on the command line
• Advanced users who want an AI assistant to operate archives directly via MCP

Quick Start

Desktop App

1. Download and install the package for your platform from the Releases page (macOS .dmg, Windows .msi/.exe, Linux .deb/.AppImage)
2. Drag an archive onto the window to inspect and extract it
3. Switch to Create, drag in files or folders, pick a format and compression level, and save

Command Line

1. Install via Homebrew or Scoop, or download the CLI archive for your platform
2. Use subcommands such as list, extract, create, test and info
3. Add --json to any command for scripting and use --include to filter extracted entries

MCP Server

1. Build or download ziplark-mcp, or use the .mcpb bundle
2. Register the server with an MCP client and add --allow-write when write access is needed

Core Advantages

• Small footprint: the release profile is size-optimized and the desktop app reuses the OS webview instead of bundling a browser engine
• Faithful output: permissions, modification times and symlinks survive extraction, so binaries still run
• Safe by design: every extraction path passes through a single guard that checks both the entry name and what is actually on disk, preventing escapes from the destination
• Consistent behavior: the GUI, CLI and MCP server share one core engine, so anything the CLI does the app does too

System Requirements

Item	Requirement
OS	Windows, macOS, Linux
Architecture	x86_64, aarch64 (a macOS universal build is provided)
Runtime	The desktop app can use installers, while the CLI and MCP server can run from prebuilt binaries

Notes

• RAR and ISO are extract-only: RAR's compression format is proprietary and ISO is a disc-image container
• RAR extraction uses the UnRAR library, whose license does not permit re-creating the RAR compression algorithm
• Listing very large archives is paged, so filtering with include is more efficient than paging through