How to open .rar files on a Mac

Double-click a .rar file on a Mac and nothing useful happens. macOS ships with Archive Utility, which handles .zip, .tar, .gz and a few relatives — but not RAR. RAR is a proprietary format owned by RARLAB, and Apple has never licensed a decoder for it.

So you need something else. Before you install anything, though, it is worth spending ten seconds on a question most guides skip.

First: is it actually a RAR?

A file extension is a label someone typed. It is not the file. Archives get renamed by download managers, by email clients, by well-meaning people zipping up a folder of RARs and calling the result photos.rar.

Every archive format announces itself in its opening bytes. A real RAR starts with the ASCII characters Rar!. A ZIP starts with PK. A 7-Zip archive starts with 7z. Those bytes are the truth; the extension is a guess.

This matters because “I can’t open this RAR” turns out, often enough, to mean “this isn’t a RAR.” If the file is really a ZIP, you already have everything you need and can stop reading.

If it really is a RAR

You have three reasonable options on macOS.

The Unarchiver is the usual answer — free, from the App Store, and it registers itself as the handler for .rar so double-clicking starts working. It reads RAR alongside a long list of other formats. For most people this is the end of the story.

Keka is the other well-regarded free option, and it can create archives as well as extract them. If you also want to make .7z files, it is the better pick.

unar on the command line comes from the same project as The Unarchiver and is available through Homebrew:

brew install unar
unar archive.rar

Worth knowing if you are extracting many files at once, or working over SSH.

The multi-part case

If you have archive.part1.rar, archive.part2.rar and so on, do not try to extract each one. They are pieces of a single archive. Put them all in the same folder and open part 1 only — the extractor finds the rest by name. If any part is missing, extraction will fail partway through, and there is no way to recover the missing content from the parts you do have.

What about password-protected RARs?

Extraction tools will prompt you for the password, and that works fine. What no tool can do is recover a password you do not have. RAR encrypts the file contents with AES, and there is no back door — the “RAR password recovery” products you will find advertised are brute-force guessers, and against a decent password they will not finish in your lifetime.

Why file.zip cannot open your RAR

Worth being straightforward about this: file.zip works with ZIP archives, not RAR. Everything it does runs inside your browser, and the decoder it uses reads the ZIP format only.

What it can do is tell you what you actually have. Drop the file into the inspector and it reads the leading bytes and names the real format — including RAR, 7-Zip, gzip and the rest — without sending the file anywhere. If it turns out to be a ZIP with the wrong name, the inspector will open it right there.