Issues getting yara to work with crits

[sparrowd]

Hello,

I am installing a new instance of crits and I am running into an issue getting the yara services to work and any assistance I could get would be useful. I am getting the Error running service: 'str' object has no attribute 'strings'. I read the issues from 2014 where someone else was getting this and I have uninstalled and reinstalled yara and yara python. I have tried different versions to get this running. I have pip and apt-get installed stuff and still getting this issues.

The rule I am running is as follows and is just a copied version of the rule in the Yara Rule Tester (which also isn't working)

rule my_rule
{
strings:
$a = { 4D 5A }

condition:
    $a

}
}

[preimpressions]

Same issue here. Now, when I disabled the service, rebooted the server, enabled, then rebooted the Yara service. The Yara service is running continuously and then, CRITS crashes.