unrar cffi vs included rarfile - evilhero/mylar3 GitHub Wiki

By default, ComicTagger requires the use of unrar-cffi in order to unrar archives.

However, after including the requirement in the Mylar3 repo it's been very clear that there are several issues with using this option, not the least of which is actually being able to compile it using pip. This also confuses the issue as Windows users cannot use a version of python above 3.8 due to incompatible modules required by unrar-cffi. Even if you don't use metatagging within Mylar3, this requirement will cause the install to fail otherwise (things will still work, but it will fail during the pip install).

Due to this, we have removed the unrar-cffi and unrar installation from the requirements.txt currently within the python3-dev branch.

If you were able to install unrar-cffi and things are working, then you don't have to do anything. Mylar3 will still use the existing installation location as per normal and utilise any added benefits of unrar-cffi.

If you want to try to use unrar-cffi, then you can simply do a pip install unrar-cffi after you've performed the pip installation of the requirements.txt. If the unrar-cffi fails during the compile/build during the pip installation, you can now choose to use the rarfile method and not try to fight through the compilation problems.

If you just don't want to be bothered using unrar-cffi due to any of the above issues - then you don't have to.

If you are not using the unrar-cffi aspect, there are now 2 requirements external to pip:

  • that you have a working unrar binary somewhere on your OS that's available for use.
  • if the unrar binary is in your PATH environment, you need not do anything else (ie. if you type unrar from a command line and get a response back)
  • if the unrar is NOT in your PATH environment, you will need to tell Mylar3 where it is located. This is accomplished by:
    • Starting Mylar3 and then stop it if you haven't done this already.
    • A .ComicTagger directory will be created, either in the root of the Mylar installation, or in the user that runs Mylar3's home directory.
    • You will need to edit the settings file therein and change the value of rar_exe_path to the FULL path to the unrar binary (ie. rar_exe_path = /usr/local/bin/unrar).