Rare

Rare is an open source alternative for Epic Games Launcher, using Legendary.

This project is maintained by RareDevs

Logo

Rare

Logo by @MultisampledNight available here, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Discord Shield

What is Rare?

A graphical interface for Legendary, a command line alternative to Epic Games launcher, written in PySide6

Why Rare?

Screenshots

Game covers Vertical list
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Game details Game settings
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Downloads Application settings
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Installation

Windows

There is an .msi installer available in releases page.

There is also a semi-portable .zip archive in releases page that lets you run Rare without installing it.

Important: On recent version of Windows you should have MSVC 2015 installed, you can get it from here

Packages

Linux

AppImage

Available in releases page.

Flatpak

Rare is available as a flatpak. See rare.

Install it via:

flatpak install flathub io.github.dummerle.rare

Run it via:

flatpak run io.github.dummerle.rare

Alternatively, you can download the flatpak package from our repository

Arch based

There are some AUR packages available:

macOS

There is a .dmg file available in releases page.

Rare’s macOS binaries are currently not singed and because of that when you launch Rare, you will see an error, that the package is from an unknown source. You have to enable it manually in Settings -> Security and Privacy. Otherwise, Gatekeeper will block Rare from running.

After installing Rare, if macOS complains that it is damaged, open a terminal and run the following command

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Rare.app

which will allow the application to run normally.

Alternatively, you can install using pip/pipx or from source.

Latest development version

In the actions tab you can find packages for the latest commits.

Note: They might be unstable and likely broken.

Installation via pip (platform independent)

Execute pip install Rare for all users, or pip install Rare --user for the current user only.

It is possible to create a desktop link, or a start menu link. Execute the command above with --desktop-shortcut or --startmenu-shortcut option, alternatively you can create them in the settings.

Note about $PATH: Depending on your operating system and the python distribution, the following paths might need to be in your environment’s PATH

OS Path
Windows <python_installation_folder>\Scripts
Linux /home/<username>/.local/bin
macOS /Users/<username>/Library/Python/3.x/bin

Running from source (advanced)

  1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/RareDevs/Rare.
  2. Change your working directory to the project folder: cd Rare.
  3. Optional: keep Rare isolated from your local python installation.
    • Create a virtualenv to install Rare into using python -m venv venv
    • Active your virtualenv
      • Linux/MacOS: source ./venv/bin/activate
      • Windows: .\venv\scripts\activate.ps1
  4. Optional: make sure all generated files are up to date.
    • Use pip install ruff PySide6-Essentials to install the packages required by the following scripts.
    • Run 
      ./tools/ui2py.sh --force
./tools/qrc2py.sh --force
./tools/ts2qm.py
  5. Use pip install . to install Rare and its runtime dependencies.
  6. You can use pip install .[discordrpc] or pip install .[webview] instead to install optional dependencies for Discord Presence and Webview respectively.
  7. Run the application with rare or python3 -m rare.
    • If you installed in a virtualenv, you need to activate it before running Rare.

In Arch Linux

You can run

sudo pacman --needed -S python-wheel python-setuptools python-setuptools-scm python-pyside6 python-qtawesome python-requests python-orjson
yay -S legendary python-vdf

Packaging

Packaging is done in accordance to PEP-517. For that you need the build and installer packages. After you ensure these are installed, Rare can be built and installed using

python -m build
python -m installer dist/rare-*.whl

Contributing

There are several options to contribute.

More information is available in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Running from source for developmenmt purposes

  1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/RareDevs/Rare.git.
  2. Change your working directory to the project folder: cd Rare.
  3. Run pip install -e . to install Rare in editable mode along with any required runtime dependencies.
  4. External tools used for development can be installed by running pip install -e .[dev] instead.

Reporting issues

If you run into any issues, you can report them by creating an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/RareDevs/Rare/issues/new/choose

When reporting issues, it is helpful to also include the logs with your issue. You can find the longs in the following locations depending on your operating system

OS Path
Windows C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Rare\Rare\cache\logs
Linux /home/<username>/.cache/Rare/Rare/logs
macOS /Users/<username>/Library/Caches/Rare/Rare/logs

In these folders you will find files named like below

These are the logs for the main Rare application. As such are importand when Rare itself is crashing.

These are the logs for each of the games you run through Rare. Rare uses a separate instance of itself to launch games, and these are the logs of that instance.

If you don’t have a GitHub account or you just want to chat, you also can contact us on Discord: https://discord.gg/YvmABK9YSk

Common issues