libarchive

Pre-built binary releases of libarchive for Windows (MSVC / MinGW x64) and Linux (GCC x86_64).

This repository exists purely to produce binary releases — DLLs, static libraries, headers and CLI tools (bsdtar, bsdcpio, bsdcat) — in both static and dynamic variants. No upstream source code is modified.

Releases

Each release contains six artifacts:

Artifact	Platform	Compiler	Linking	Contents
*-windows-msvc-x64-static.zip	Windows	MSVC	Static	Standalone CLI tools, static lib, self-contained DLL, headers
*-windows-msvc-x64-dynamic.zip	Windows	MSVC	Dynamic	DLL-linked CLI tools, shared DLL, import lib, dependency DLLs, headers
*-windows-mingw-x64-static.zip	Windows	MinGW UCRT64	Static	Standalone CLI tools, libarchive.a, self-contained libarchive.dll, headers
*-windows-mingw-x64-dynamic.zip	Windows	MinGW UCRT64	Dynamic	DLL-linked CLI tools, libarchive.dll, import .dll.a, headers
*-linux-gcc-x64-static.tar.gz	Linux	GCC	Static	Statically-linked CLI tools, libarchive.a, headers
*-linux-gcc-x64-dynamic.tar.gz	Linux	GCC	Dynamic	Dynamically-linked CLI tools, libarchive.so, headers

Download from the Releases page.

Static build library files (Windows)

The Windows static builds include multiple library files:

File	Purpose
archive.lib (MSVC) / libarchive.a (MinGW)	Static library — link this to embed libarchive directly into your executable
libarchive.dll	Self-contained DLL with all dependencies statically linked — no external DLLs required
libarchive.lib (MSVC) / libarchive.dll.a (MinGW)	Import library for the DLL — link this when using the DLL

Choose one approach: either link the static library for a single executable, or distribute the DLL with your application and link against the import library.

Dependencies

All variants are built with the following libraries:

Library	Purpose
zlib	gzip compression
bzip2	bzip2 compression
liblzma	xz/lzma compression
lz4	LZ4 compression
zstd	Zstandard compression
OpenSSL	Cryptography (encrypted ZIP/7zip/RAR, hash verification, XAR signatures)
libiconv	Character set conversion
libxml2	XML parsing (xar format)

Static builds embed all eight libraries directly into the binaries. The resulting DLLs, static libraries and CLI tools have no external dependencies beyond Windows system DLLs (KERNEL32.dll, bcrypt.dll, UCRT) or the Linux system C library. No VC++ Redistributable or MinGW runtime DLLs are required.

Shared builds link against these libraries dynamically and ship the dependency DLLs alongside.

Building

Builds are triggered via GitHub Actions workflow_dispatch with an upstream release tag (e.g. v3.8.5). The workflow checks out the corresponding tag from the upstream submodule and compiles from source.

Windows (MSVC)

• Compiler: MSVC (Visual Studio 17 2022, x64)
• Dependencies via vcpkg (x64-windows-static triplet for static builds)
• Static variant uses /MT CRT (no VC++ Redistributable required)
• Two CMake passes produce both a static .lib and a self-contained .dll

Windows (MinGW)

• Compiler: GCC via MSYS2 UCRT64 environment
• Dependencies via pacman
• Static variant uses -static linking (no external runtime dependencies)
• Two CMake passes produce both a static .a and a self-contained .dll

Linux

• Compiler: GCC (x86_64)
• Dependencies via apt