RegDiff – A Windows Registry Diff and Patch Utility

Overview

RegDiff is a Rust library designed to calculate differences between two Windows Registry files. It inspects two registry snapshots, computes the modifications (additions, deletions, and updates) in registry keys and their respective values, and outputs a patch file representing the diff. Under the hood, RegDiff leverages the regashii crate for registry serialization and deserialization.

Usage

Add regdiff as a dependency in Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
regdiff-rs = "*"

RegDiff provides a Diff trait implemented for registry keys and values. You can calculate a diff between two registries as follows:

use regdiff_rs::prelude::{Diff, Hive, Registry};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    // Load the old and new registry snapshots. Hive needs to be manually specified as Wine registry files do not contain hive information.
    let o_reg = Registry::try_from("./registries/old.reg", Hive::LocalMachine)?;
    let n_reg = Registry::try_from("./registries/new.reg", Hive::LocalMachine)?;

    // Calculate the difference between registries.
    let diff = Registry::diff(&o_reg, &n_reg);

    // Serialize the diff patch to a file.
    diff.serialize_file("patch.reg")?;

    Ok(())
}

Using the Example Executable

An example executable is available under the examples directory. To run the example:

cargo run --example diff

Contributing

Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome! Feel free to check the issue tracker or submit a pull request on GitHub.

License

This project is licensed under the GPLv3 License – see the LICENSE file for details.