rvt-rs

Inspect Revit files without installing Revit.

rvt-rs is an open-source toolkit for reading Autodesk Revit project, family and template files (.rvt, .rfa, .rte, .rft). It reads a file's metadata, preview images and embedded schema. On the Revit releases it supports, it also recovers the building's elements (walls, floors, roofs, doors, windows, stairs, curtain walls, furniture, MEP and structure) with the names, types, storeys, materials and identifiers Revit gives them, and exports them as IFC4 (the open building-model exchange format), glTF (3D), plan SVG and CSV schedules.

It comes as command-line tools, a Rust library, Python bindings and a browser viewer that reads your file inside the browser tab. It is built from public observations of the file format (CLEANROOM.md), licensed under the Apache License 2.0, and not affiliated with Autodesk.

Start here

What you want to do	Where to start
See a model without installing anything	Open the browser viewer and pick a demo, or drop in a file of your own.
Inspect or export files from the command line	The installation guide; prebuilt binaries are on GitHub Releases.
Work with files in Python	The Python guide (pip install rvt).
Check what your file will give	What you can rely on, by input, then the user guide.
Use the Rust library	The examples (open a file, list its elements, export it), the library surface and the API documentation.
Tell us how it went on your own models	Discussion #982: your diagnostics are enough, never the building.
Ask a question, report a problem or contribute	Discussions for questions, and the contribution guide for everything else.

Support and evidence

Support depends on the Revit release, the file type and the feature. Opening a file and reading its metadata does not mean its elements or geometry can be recovered, and every export comes with diagnostics that say what was approximated or left out: check them before relying on an export for measurement or coordination. The figures in docs/evidence.md compare rvt-rs's export with Revit's own IFC export of the same file, element by element, and docs/support-matrix.json records each capability with its evidence and its status ceiling. A "Measure run" is a run of the repository's Measure workflow, which exports the redistributable reference models on GitHub's runners and scores them against Revit's own exports with the scorers in tools/re/; an RE number is a report in reports/element-framing/.

Support by Revit release

Each row is rendered from docs/support-matrix.json, and CI fails when this table and the matrix disagree. "Projects" is the matrix's status for the release's project element records, "What a project gives" the capability it rates, and "Families" the status of the release's family files (metadata, previews and schema). The status words are the matrix's own: verified, partial, experimental, unsupported and unknown.

Revit release	Projects	What a project gives	Families
2008 to 2010	experimental	Revit 2008 to 2010 partition element records, read in the 32-bit layout of Revit 2011 to 2023, with storeys and named materials	not measured
2011 to 2014	experimental	Revit 2011 to 2014 partition element records, read in the 32-bit layout of Revit 2015 to 2023, with storeys, hosts, type names, layer sets and materials	not measured
2015 to 2018	experimental	Revit 2015 to 2018 partition element records, read in the 32-bit layout of Revit 2019 to 2023, with storeys, hosts, type names, layer sets and materials	not measured (2015); verified (2016 to 2018)
2019 to 2022	experimental	Revit 2019 to 2022 partition element records, read in Revit 2023's 32-bit layout, with storeys, hosts, type names, layer sets and materials	verified
2023	partial	Revit 2023 partition element records, with wall joins, beam cuts, room outlines, storeys, hosts, family and type names, materials and layer sets (RE-81)	verified
2024	partial	Revit 2024 partition element records as typed IFC elements, with joins, profiles and cuts where decoded, storeys, family and type names, materials and layers, GlobalIds and stair dimensions	verified
2025	partial	Revit 2025 partition element records (walls, slabs, rooms, and the rest of the RE-21 categories)	verified
2026	experimental	Revit 2026 partition element records, with storeys, rooms, doors and windows, type names and layer sets	verified
2027	experimental	Revit 2027 partition element records, with storeys, rooms, doors and windows, type names, layer sets and wall joins	verified

The measured detail behind each row is in docs/evidence.md, and rvt-capabilities --matrix -f text prints the matrix.

Install and quick start

The latest release is v0.12.2 (2026-11-03). Install it with any of:

• the prebuilt Linux, macOS and Windows binaries on GitHub Releases, or the container image ghcr.io/drunkonjava/rvt-rs;
• cargo install rvt --locked;
• pip install rvt, for the Python bindings;
• nothing at all: the browser viewer reads a file inside the tab.

docs/install.md covers every channel, building from source and the smoke tests. This README describes main, which the browser viewer is also built from, so it can be ahead of the latest release: "Upgrading from 0.11" in the changelog says what a user of 0.11 has to change and "Upgrading from 0.12.1" what a user of 0.12.1 has to, and each change main adds after 0.12.2 is a fragment in changelog.d/, which the next release moves into CHANGELOG.md. To use main before the next release, build from source (docs/install.md).

Three commands cover most of what the command line does:

rvt-info model.rvt
rvt-ifc model.rvt -o model.ifc --diagnostics model.diagnostics.json
rvt-elements model.rvt --counts

rvt-info reads the file's release, metadata and previews, rvt-ifc writes IFC4 and a diagnostics file that says what the export approximated or left out, and rvt-elements --counts counts the recovered elements by class as JSON. The same from Python, on a project file:

import rvt

f = rvt.RevitFile("model.rvt")
print(f.version)                 # the Revit release year, or None
counts = f.element_counts()      # {"total": int, "by_class": {class name: count}}
elements = f.decoded_elements()  # dicts with id, class_name, byte_range, fields, parameters, typed
with open("model.ifc", "w") as out:
    out.write(f.write_ifc())     # IFC4 STEP as a str, in rvt-ifc's default mode

The Python guide documents the rest, with a Jupyter notebook.

In the browser

Drop a .rvt, .rfa, .rte or .rft at https://drunkonjava.github.io/rvt-rs/: the file is read and converted inside the tab and is not uploaded. The viewer is the core library compiled to WebAssembly, with the 12 JS-callable wasm-bindgen bindings of the rvt-wasm crate (docs/viewer-api.md); it parses in a worker, draws with Three.js and exports glTF 2.0 binary, IFC4 STEP and plan-view SVG. It is built from main, not from a release, and its demo gallery opens two MIT-licensed real projects, hash-verified when staged.

Every deploy checks the viewer's privacy posture in two ways. viewer/scripts/audit-wasm-imports.mjs reads each import of the compiled .wasm and its shim in the JavaScript glue, and fails if any reaches fetch, XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, EventSource or sendBeacon. A Playwright test opens a real project in the built viewer and fails on any request to another origin, or on any request at all after the file is open. The page's Content-Security-Policy also limits its connections to its own origin. Together these cover the WebAssembly module's imports, the page's connection policy and the flow the test drives; they are checks, not a proof about every possible code path. docs/viewer-privacy-posture.md states the invariant and what each check covers.

What does not work yet

The full list, with each gap's status and evidence, is in docs/evidence.md. In brief:

• Files from before Revit 2008 are not read, and 2008 to 2014 files are experimental, measured on local files only and outside the 1.0 range.
• Revit 2015 to 2022 and 2027 projects are experimental: measured against the same models saved by a neighbouring release, not against Revit's own export (one 2015 project, RE-198, and one 2018 project, RE-315, aside). Revit 2026 is experimental too, measured on one project.
• On Revit 2008 to 2023, 2026 and 2027 projects an element's body is its bounding box, cut back at its joins where they are read. On 2024 and 2025 it is the box only where the bytes are not decoded: roofs by extrusion outside Revit 2025, hip roofs over a T or U footprint, monolithic spiral stair flights and straight riserless ones with a nosing, edited wall profiles, ducts and pipe fittings. From 2023, doors and windows are drawn from Revit's saved meshes where those decode whole; furniture and other loadable families stay boxes unless --saved-meshes is given.
• rvt-elements and Python list each element's saved parameters on Revit 2023 to 2027 files, experimentally on 2015 to 2022 ones and not on 2008 to 2014, but built-in parameters have no name, a wall's or floor's type parameters are not joined to it, and only rvt-ifc --revit-property-sets writes the rest into IFC.
• Family files give metadata, previews and types but no family geometry, and template files (.rte, .rft) are not measured, because no template is in any corpus.
• Rooms are not checked against the phase, so a room created in an earlier phase than the last is written, which Revit's export may leave out.
• Semantic editing of a Revit file is not implemented: the write path patches named streams byte for byte, and field-level writes wait on ADR-002.

Command-line tools

Rust 2024 edition (MSRV 1.87). Nineteen CLIs ship (rvt-analyze, rvt-info, rvt-inspect, rvt-schema, rvt-history, rvt-diff, rvt-corpus, rvt-dump, rvt-doc, rvt-ifc, rvt-ifc-compare, rvt-write, rvt-gltf, rvt-sheet, rvt-elem-table, rvt-elements, rvt-capabilities, rvt-schedule, gen-fixture) plus the reproducible probes under probes/examples/, one or more per format finding. Python bindings via pyo3+maturin in the rvt-py workspace member (so the core rvt crate can stay unconditionally #![forbid(unsafe_code)]) — pip install rvt.

rvt-analyze --redact path/to/your.rfa prints a file report: identity, upgrade history, format anchors, the schema table, the schema-to-data link histogram, content metadata and a disclosure scan. Every command with an example, the Rust library's modules and the research probes are in docs/library.md.

For contributors

Use the Codespaces development environment for remote Linux builds and the viewer from VS Code, a terminal, Codex or Claude Code.

rvt-rs is a clean-room reader for Revit files: an Apache-2.0 Rust core with Python bindings and a WebAssembly viewer, with no Revit install or Autodesk SDK at build or run time. Contributing does not need private files either — the checked-in corpus/tier1/ synthetic fixtures drive the default gates, and corpus-backed tests skip themselves while RVT_PROJECT_CORPUS_DIR is unset.

• Build: stable Rust 1.87 or newer, then cargo build. Viewer: cd viewer && pnpm install --frozen-lockfile. Python bindings: docs/python.md.
• Gate: tools/check-local.sh runs the checks a pull request must pass: cargo fmt --check, cargo clippy -D warnings, rustdoc with -D warnings, a build of every target, and the real-file, CLI and contract checks. --viewer, --corpus, --deny, --audit add the optional gates.
• How changes are verified: against real Revit files and Revit's own exports, through the built CLIs, and by contract checks that keep the published claims honest. tools/ci/test-targets.txt classes every target under tests/ (corpus-gated ones skip without their corpus); tests/fuzz_regressions.rs replays crash-shaped inputs on every pull request; libFuzzer targets are in fuzz/, Playwright browser tests in viewer/tests/ and Python tests in tests/python/. The unit tests written before this policy were removed from the crate's source (#1126), and new ones are not accepted (CONTRIBUTING.md says why).
• What "done" looks like: the gate is green, the pull-request template's checklist is filled in, and any change to user-visible capability updates docs/status.md and docs/support-matrix.json in the same PR — the project does not claim what its tests cannot show.
• Start here: CONTRIBUTING.md walks from clone to a first pull request; docs/contribution-map.md maps the larger areas; small tasks carry the good first issue label.

License and trademarks

• Code: Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE for the full text and NOTICE for attribution.
• Trademarks: "Autodesk" and "Revit" are registered trademarks of Autodesk, Inc. rvt-rs is an independent project, not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Autodesk; it uses the names only to identify the file format it reads.
• Provenance: rvt-rs contains no Autodesk source code. Its knowledge of the format comes from the bytes of publicly available files, the exported symbol names of the public RevitAPI.dll NuGet package and previously published reverse-engineering work. buildingSMART's IFC specifications guide the IFC mapping, and Autodesk's open-source exporter revit-ifc (LGPL) is read, never copied, for what Revit's own IFC export writes, and never for the file format. CLEANROOM.md lists the sources contributions may use and the declaration a format finding carries, and NOTICE gives the project's notices. This section describes how the project is built; it is not legal advice.