Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Archive support for 7z and rar files

Beets by default does not support 7z and rar files. However, you can enable support for these formats by installing the unrar and/or py7zr packages in your container. (See also beets documentation).

As we are running an alpine image this is not as straightforward as it sounds.

rar support

To enable rar support, you can use the unrar binary from the EDM115/unrar-alpine repository. This repository provides a precompiled unrar binary that is compatible with Alpine Linux.

# /config/startup.sh
apk add --no-cache curl jq


curl -LsSf https://api.github.com/repos/EDM115/unrar-alpine/releases/latest \
    | jq -r '.assets[] | select(.name == "unrar") | .id' \
    | xargs -I {} curl -LsSf https://api.github.com/repos/EDM115/unrar-alpine/releases/assets/{} \
    | jq -r '.browser_download_url' \
    | xargs -I {} curl -Lsf {} -o /tmp/unrar && \
    install -v -m755 /tmp/unrar /usr/local/bin

# You MUST install required libraries or else you'll run into linked libraries loading issues
apk add --no-cache libstdc++ libgcc

# /config/requirements.txt
rarfile

7z support

To enable 7z support, you can use the py7zr package, which also needs some shenanigans to install on Alpine Linux.

# /config/startup.sh
apk add gcc musl-dev linux-headers

# /config/requirements.txt
py7zr

Troubleshooting and Debugging

A good starting point is to check the logs of the container. We can do this by running:

docker logs beets-flask

To get more detailed information, we can set environment variable of the container:

services:
    beets-flask:
        environment:
            BEETSFLASKLOG: "/logs/beets-flask.log"
            LOG_LEVEL_BEETSFLASK: DEBUG
        volumes:
            - /path/to/logs/on/host:/logs

Which lets you increase the logs verbosity, and define where to put the logs.