Installing OR-Tools .Net from Source on Windows

Introduction

This guide explains how to install OR-Tools from source, with support for .Net, on Windows. 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 Windows variants, we have only tested them on machines meeting the following requirements:

Windows 10 64-bit (x86_64) with
Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio Community 2017

Prerequisites

The following sections describe the prerequisites for installing OR-Tools from source.

Visual Studio

To install and run OR-Tools on Windows, you must have Visual Studio 2017 or later installed on your computer with the C++ toolset for Visual Studio. You can find more details here.

To build OR-Tools programs from the command line you must use a x64 Native Tools Command Prompt (not the Developer Command Prompt). You can find more details here.

Git

Git, which can be downloaded from https://git-scm.com/.

CMake

CMake (>= 3.5), which can be downloaded from https://www.cmake.org/download. When installing CMake, select the option for a command-line accessible cmake.

.NET Core 2.1 SDK

You must install the package .NET Core 2.1 SDK version 2.1.302 or higher from the following location: dotnet-sdk-2.1.402-windows-x64-installer

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

To get the stable source code for OR-Tools, clone the stable branch from GitHub or download the latest release in a compressed file. You can do so 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 v7.4 release instead of the master branch, enter the following commands in your local repo:
```
git fetch --all --tags --prune>
```
```
git checkout tags/v7.2 -b v7.2>
```

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:
```
tools\make third_party
```
To use a third party solver, open Makefile.local in the main or-tools directory, and add the path to the directory where you installed the solver. For example, for SCIP you would add this:
```
WINDOWS_SCIP_DIR=c:/Program Files/SCIPOptSuite
```
Compile OR-Tools by entering
```
tools\make dotnet
```
You can check that everything is running correctly by entering
```
tools\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.

Using a third-party solver

You can use OR-Tools with any of the following third-party solvers:

If you have already installed OR-Tools and want to configure it to use one of these solvers, do the following steps:

Open a terminal and navigate to the or-tools directory. Then enter the following command:
```
tools\make third_party
```
Open Makefile.local and add the path to the directory where you installed the solver. For example, for SCIP you would add this:
```
WINDOWS_SCIP_DIR=c:/Program Files/SCIPOptSuite
```
Compile OR-Tools by entering
```
make clean
```
```
make all
```

Install the SCIP Optimization Suite

To install the SCIP Optimization Suite on Windows, simply download the x64 installer and run it.

After the installation is complete, follow the instructions in Using a third-party solver.

Cleaning the build files

If you need to re-install OR-Tools, the command:

tools\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

tools\make third_party

tools\make dotnet