How to Open RAR Files on Mac

Double-click a .rar on a fresh Mac and macOS shrugs — Archive Utility handles zip, gzip, and tar, but RAR is a proprietary format Apple has never supported. The fix takes two minutes: install one free extractor, point macOS at it, and RAR files open like anything else from then on.

Pick a free extractor

• The Unarchiver — free on the Mac App Store. Does one job: extracts almost every archive format ever made (RAR included, even old RAR versions), with excellent handling of non-English file names. No interface to learn; it works through double-clicks.
• Keka — free from keka.io (the Mac App Store copy is paid to support development — same app). Extracts RAR and also creates archives in many formats, so it’s the better pick if you send files as often as you receive them. It can’t create RAR — nothing on the Mac can without RARLAB’s own licensed tool — but it covers zip and 7z creation well.

Both are safe, mature, widely used projects. Skip the sketchy “RAR opener” apps that surface in search ads; the two above are the entire shortlist you need. If you only ever receive the occasional archive, The Unarchiver from the App Store is the simplest safe choice.

Make double-click just work

After installing, teach macOS that RAR belongs to your new app:

1. Select any .rar file in Finder and press Cmd+I.
2. In the Open with section, choose The Unarchiver (or Keka) from the menu.
3. Click Change All… and confirm — every RAR from now on opens with a double-click. To undo later, repeat these steps and pick a different app.

Extraction drops the contents into the same folder as the archive (both apps let you change the destination in their preferences). The .rar itself stays put — delete it once you’ve confirmed the contents extracted cleanly.

The Terminal route

If you have Homebrew, the unar tool (The Unarchiver’s command-line sibling) handles RAR from the shell:

# install once
brew install unar
# list what's inside without extracting
lsar archive.rar
# extract into the current folder
unar archive.rar
# uninstall if you change your mind
brew uninstall unar

Multi-part and password-protected RARs

Big downloads often arrive split: name.part1.rar, name.part2.rar, and so on (older sets use .rar, .r00, .r01…). The rule is simple: put every part in the same folder, then open only the first part — .part1.rar or the plain .rar. The extractor stitches the rest together automatically. “Archive is incomplete” errors mean a part is missing or misnamed; re-download the part it names.

Password-protected RARs prompt for the password at extraction time in both apps (and unar asks in Terminal, or accepts -p yourpassword). No password, no contents — the encryption in modern RAR is strong enough that there’s no practical way around it.

Receiving RAR is easy; sending is the trap

One thing neither free app fixes: creating RAR files. The format is proprietary, and only RARLAB’s own paid tool can build them. In practice this doesn’t matter — if you need to pass an archive along, extract the RAR, then select the extracted folder in Finder and use right-click → Compress to re-bundle it as a zip anyone can open. Same contents, no special software on the other end.

And if someone regularly sends you RARs that are giving you trouble, the kindest fix is upstream: ask them for zip or 7z. Every platform they might use can create one of the two for free, and you stop debugging archives entirely — no installs, no default-app setup, no multi-part reassembly on your side of the exchange.