How to unpackage rar files in Transmission

Apps and Virtualization
1

Hello All,

I have been working on this all day and have been pulling my hair out and I’m at my wits end.

I’m a long time CORE user and had sonarr/radarr working nicely with Transmission. I was able to install unrar within my Transmission jail and ran a script to unrar files before Sonarr/Radarr grabbed them. It was easy, and worked great.

Fast forward, I’ve performed a fresh install of SCALE, and I have Sonarr/Radarr running with Transmission, and I’m able to download files, but some files download compressed and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to uncompress them.

I’ve posted on Reddit, different Discords, asked ChatGPT and so far I’m unable to figure it out or receive enough help to figure it out. I’ve tried installing the Deluge app and running it’s Extractor plugin but I’ve also had issues with that.

I know there’s an app called Unpackerr but I really don’t know anything about docker containers and how to set them up so I’ve struggled trying to piece this together.

If anyone can please help me run the Transmission app and set it up in a way that it will uncompress files so that Sonarr/Radarr can grab them then that would be greatly appreciated.

any help is greatly appreciated because I’m feeling super defeated today.

Thanks.

2

Does it have to be automated, upon completion of a download in Transmission?

The host SCALE system might now have 7z, which supports most compressed archive formats.

3

I would prefer if it’s automated, but at this point I’ll accept having to do it manually if that’s my only option.

This process was automated in CORE so I was hoping it would be in SCALE.

4

You were using a jail in Core, which gives you a full filesystem and package management.

In the next release of SCALE, Fangtooth will feature “containers” that work like jails.

5

it’s been a while since I looked into it, Transmission should let you run a script after a download.

A solution would be to use a shell script to call unrar to decompress (with unrar x $FILE). If you have more than a file and/or a combination of extensions, you will need to limit your scope to *.rar and potentially iterate through each file in your path.

You’ll need to stop the service, edit the settings.json file and re-start the service. It needs to be in this order for things to take hold. Remember to make the script executable :slight_smile:

6

unpackerr really is the best way “hotio/unpackerr:latest” is a container that can do it automatically for most compressed files. You need to modify the unpackerr.conf add your api keys and show it where the arr programs are and it does the rest. Everything below would need paths changed depending on your setup but if you spent a couple hours at it you can probably figure it out.

Example of the conf entries

[[lidarr]]
url = “http://192.168.1.21:8686”
api_key = “e61fXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXe”
File system path where downloaded Lidarr items are located.
paths = [‘/mnt/Downloads’]
Default protocols is torrent. Alternative: “torrent,usenet”
protocols = “torrent”
How long to wait for a reply from the backend.
timeout = “10s”
How long to wait after import before deleting the extracted items.
delete_delay = “1440m”

Here is an example of the yaml file I use for setting up the container.

name: unpackerr
services:
  main_app:
    cpu_shares: 10
    command: []
    container_name: unpackerr
    deploy:
      resources:
        limits:
          memory: 512M
    image: hotio/unpackerr:latest   
    ports:
      - target: 5656
        published: "5656"
        protocol: tcp
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - type: bind
        source: /mnt/Docker_Apps/unpackerr
        target: /config
      - type: bind
        source: /mnt/Downloads/Downloads
        target: /mnt/Downloads
    devices: []
    cap_add: []
    environment: []
    network_mode: bridge
    privileged: false