Introduction
This guide explains how to install OR-Tools from source, with support for .Net, on MacOS. Unless you plan to modify the source code or use a third-party solver with OR-Tools, we recommend the binary installation.
Although these instructions might also work on other MacOS variants, we have only tested them on machines meeting the following requirements:
- MacOS 10.15.5 (Catalina) 64-bit (x86_64)
Prerequisites
The following sections describe the prerequisites for installing OR-Tools from source.
Xcode Command Line Tools
You must install the Xcode Command Line Tools. To do so, open the Terminal, found in
/Applications/Utilities/
, and enter:
xcode-select --install
Click “Install” to download and install Xcode Command Line Tools. You don’t need to "Get Xcode" from the App Store. If you have a slow Internet connection, it may take many minutes.
Verify that you’ve successfully installed Xcode Command Line Tools:
xcode-select -p
You should see:
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
Homebrew
To install the remaining prerequisites, we recommend first installing the "missing package manager for macOS" otherwise known as Homebrew. To do so, open a terminal window and enter:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew update
To verify that you’ve successfully installed brew:
brew --version
You should see:
Homebrew 1.6.9-8-g25542d7 Homebrew/homebrew-core (git revision 0e0c84; last commit 2018-06-20)
C++ tools
To install C++ tools, open a terminal window and enter:
brew install cmake wget pkg-config
SWIG tool
To install SWIG tool, open a terminal window and enter:
brew install swig
.Net tools
To install .Net tools, open a terminal window and enter:
brew cask install dotnet-sdk
Download the source code
There are two distinct branches of the OR-Tools source code on GitHub: stable and master. The stable branch has been thoroughly tested and should work flawlessly on all supported platforms. The master branch is where the latest updates and improvements have been applied; it's more current, but less stable.
Download the stable source code
You can get the stable source code for OR-Tools in either of the following ways:
- Clone the stable branch by entering
git clone https://github.com/google/or-tools
- Download the latest release in a compressed file, by
clicking the Clone or download button
in GitHub.
Download the master source code
To retrieve the source code from the master branch, enter
git clone -b master https://github.com/google/or-tools
Download previous releases
You can get the source code for previous releases in either of the following ways:
- Download a previous release from the GitHub release page.
- Assuming you have already created a local repository (by
git clone
), you can check out a specific release using a Git tag. For example, to work with the v8.1 release instead of the master branch, enter the following commands in your local repo:git fetch --all --tags --prune
git checkout tags/v7.5 -b v7.5
Build third parties
Before building OR-Tools, you'll need to build the required third party software.
Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where you extracted the files. Then enter:
make third_party
Using SCIP
Since v7.8, SCIP is now integrated so you won't have to install it manually.
Using Gurobi
Gurobi is now pre-integrated. When needed, at runtime, OR-Tools will search for the Gurobi shared
library in the default install path of the Gurobi installers on MAC OS X and Windows, or by using
the GUROBI_HOME
environment variable.
Using an optional third-party MIP solver
You can also use OR-Tools with any of the following optional third-party MIP solvers whose support is disabled by default:
- CPLEX
- GLPK (Linux and MacOS only)
- Xpress Solver
To configure OR-Tools to use one of these solvers, do the following steps:
- Install the optional solver following the vendor instruction.
- Open
Makefile.local
and add the path to the directory where you have installed the solver. For example, for CPLEX you would add this:UNIX_CPLEX_DIR=cplex/install/dir
Build the source code
To build the source code, open a terminal and navigate to the directory where you extracted the files. Then enter the following command to compile OR-Tools:
make dotnet
Test the source code
You can check that everything is running correctly by entering:
make test_dotnet
This runs a selection of examples for OR-Tools. If all the examples run successfully, you are ready to get started with OR-Tools.
Cleaning the build files
If you need to re-install OR-Tools, the command:
make clean_third_party
will remove all compiled dependencies and Makefile.local
. This can be useful
for resetting to a clean state.
Then re-enter the commands
make third_party
make dotnet