How to install unrar on Windows?

[adamjstewart]

Disclaimer: I'm not a Windows person

I'm using rarfile in my project and using GitHub Actions to run tests on Linux/macOS/Windows. pip installs rarfile just fine, but I need an unrar command to actually use it. I've figured out how to do this for Linux/macOS using:

    - name: Install apt dependencies
      run: sudo apt-get install unrar
      if: ${{ runner.os == 'Linux' }}
    - name: Install brew dependencies
      run: brew install rar
      if: ${{ runner.os == 'macOS' }}

but I haven't yet figured out how to install unrar from the command line on Windows. Another option would be for conda to install both rarfile and unrar. I opened an issue for this at conda-forge/rarfile-feedstock#4.

[markokr]

In rarfile CI, the pacman seems to work well:

https://github.com/markokr/rarfile/blob/master/.github/workflows/ci.yml#L142

Ignore the download steps there, they are not used.

[adamjstewart]

Thanks, that worked! Would it be possible to add the unrar executable to the wheels available on PyPI? That would shave off 20+ lines of code from my CI script. All of our other dependencies with non-Python dependencies include them in their wheels.

[adamjstewart]

Update: this didn't work for Python 3.7 for some reason...

[markokr]

Including unrar would get very iffy licensing-wise, I would prefer not to go there...

Note that the msys64 PATH is first prepended, but latter appended, might be significant.

[adamjstewart]

Found a way easier way to test this: microsoft/torchgeo#1266