BB
Box - Open Standard Archive Format
| Box is under active development. Do not expect compatibility between versions until v1.0. |
The .box file format and related tooling is designed to be a modern successor to formats such as
.zip and .7z, removing several painpoints and introducing modern features and expectations.
Crates
| Crate | Description |
|---|---|
| box-format (this crate) | Core library for reading and writing .box archives |
| cli | Command line tool for working with .box archives |
| fusebox | FUSE driver for mounting archives (Linux/macOS) |
| projfsbox | Windows ProjFS driver for mounting archives |
| fskitbox | macOS FSKit driver for mounting archives (macOS 15.4+) |
Features
| 🌉 | Cross-platform path support, with relative paths only and platform-agnostic separators |
| 🌐 | UTF-8 only, Unicode normalised path names and string data |
| 👩🚀 | Extensible with space-efficient attributes in key-value pairs for records and whole archives |
| Configurable optional byte-alignment of files to enable easy memory mapping | |
| 💽 | FST-based path index for fast O(m) lookups and efficient prefix queries |
| 📁 | Support for directories, files and links |
| 🗜️ | Multiple compression methods within a single archive |
| 🔒 | BLAKE3 checksums for data integrity verification |
| 🖥️ | A truly cross-platform command line tool |
| 📜 | Well-defined, open specification of file format |
Compression methods
- Stored (no compression)
- Brotli
- DEFLATE
- Snappy
- xz
- Zstandard
Supported platforms
- Windows
- macOS
- Linux
- iOS
- Android
License
Licensed under either of
- Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
- MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
at your option.