Ratarmount 1.0.0 – Rapid access to large archives via a FUSE filesystem
Hi HN, Since my first posted introduction of ratarmount [0], 2 years have gone by and many features have been added. To summarize, ratarmount enables working with archived contents exposed as a filesystem without the data having to be extracted to disk: pip install ratarmount ratarmount archive.tar mounted ls -la mounted I started this project after noticing the slowness of archivemount with large TAR files and wondering how this could be because the file contents exist at some offset in the archive file and it should not be difficult to read that data. Turns out, that part was not…
In plain words
Ratarmount is a tool that mounts compressed archives as accessible filesystems without extracting them to disk. It works with TAR files, SquashFS, and other formats through various backends, allowing users to browse and access archived contents directly. Designed for developers and system administrators working with large archives, it offers faster performance than existing alternatives and supports advanced features like union mounting and recursive mounting.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, Since my first posted introduction of ratarmount [0], 2 years have gone by and many features have been added. To summarize, ratarmount enables working with archived contents exposed as a filesystem without the data having to be extracted to disk: pip install ratarmount ratarmount archive.tar mounted ls -la mounted I started this project after noticing the slowness of archivemount with large TAR files and wondering how this could be because the file contents exist at some offset in the archive file and it should not be difficult to read that data. Turns out, that part was not difficult, however packaging everything nicely, adding tests, and adding many more formats and features such as union mounting and recursive mounting, are the things keeping me busy on this project until today. Since the last Show HN, a libarchive, SquashFS, fsspec, and many more backends have been added, so that it now should be able to read every format that archivemount can and some more, and even read them remotely. However, performance for any use case besides bzip2/gzip-compressed TARs may vary even though I did my best. Personally, I am using it view to packed folders with many small files that do not change anymore. I pack these folders because else copying to other hard drives takes much longer. I'm also using it when I want to avoid the command line. I have added ratarmount as a Caja user script for mounting via right-click. This way, I can mount an archive and then copy the contents to another drive to effectively do the extraction and copying in one step. Initially, I have also used it to train on the ImageNet TAR archive directly. I probably should have released a 1.0.0 some years ago because I have kept the command line interface and even the index file format compatible as best as possible between the several 0.x versions already. Some larger future features on my wishlist are: - A new indexed_lz4 backend. This should be doable inside my indexed_bzip2 [1] / rapidgzip [2] backend library. - A custom ZIP and SquashFS reader accelerated by rapidgzip and indexed_bzip2 to enable faster seeking inside large files inside those archives. - I am eagerly awaiting the Linux Kernel FUSE BPF support [3], which might enable some further latency reductions for use cases with very small files / very small reads, at least in the case of working with uncompressed archives. I have done comparisons for such archives (100k images a 100 KiB) and noticed that direct access via the Python library ratarmountcore was roughly two times faster than access via ratarmount and FUSE. Maybe I'll even find the time to play around with the existing unmerged FUSE BPF patch set. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30631387 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31875318 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37378411 [3] https://lwn.net/Articles/937433/
Does the same job
all alternatives →- RARatarmount – Access archives through FUSE 100x faster than archivemount2022 · github.com · ▲13
- RWRatatuiRuby wraps Rust Ratatui as a RubyGem – TUIs with the joy of RubyJan 2026 · ratatui-ruby.dev · ▲152
- MAMoribito – A TUI for LDAP Viewing/Queries2025 · github.com · ▲106
Check out my TUI I wrote for viewing and querying an LDAP. I need to do basic queries and validation daily for work, and as I work on a mac, there are really no good options. The major player is the Apache Directory Studio which is... not great. So I decided to create a new one.
- PAParqeye – A CLI tool to visualize and inspect Parquet filesNov 2025 · github.com · ▲167
I built a Rust-based CLI/terminal UI for inspecting Parquet files—data, metadata, and row-group-level structure—right from the terminal. If someone sent me a Parquet file, I used to open DuckDB or Polars just to see what was inside. Now I can do it with one command. Repo: https://github.com/kaushiksrini/parqeye
- CFCopilot for Data Analysis, beyond an open-source alternative to Tableau2023 · github.com · ▲61
RATH is an open-source software for data exploration and visualization. It automates your workflow in data analysis. You can give RATH a CSV file and it will generates visualizations with insights and patterns automatically. It also has a data painter tool for more casual interaction with charts (https://youtu.be/djqePNyhz7w). It also has a lot of cool features like autovis, causal discovery, GPT integration, predictive interaction for text feature extraction, etc. Some of RATH’s components are also independent open-source project you might be interested: Like + Graphic Walker…
- FHFoyer, Hybrid in-memory and disk cache in Rust2025 · github.com · ▲18
More work this month
the category →
The app store for voice native apps that lives in your notch
Work · 28d ago · voiceos.com
The New Calendly▲211Handle all of the work before, during, and after meetings
Work · 17d ago · calendly.com
Launched alongside, November 2024
the whole month →
- IB
I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…
Dev tools · 2024 · lanparty.house
