Installing OR-Tools for Java from Binary on MacOS

Introduction

This guide explains how to install OR-Tools for Java on MacOS.

Although these instructions might also work on other MacOS variants, we have only tested them on machines meeting the following requirements:

  • MacOS 11.2.1 (Big Sur) 64-bit (x86_64)

Prerequisites

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

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)

Java JDK

You must install the Java JDK 8.0 or higher.

Once you have installed Homebrew, you can install openjdk by opening a terminal window and enter:

brew install openjdk
sudo ln -sfn /usr/local/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk
Then you need to export the JAVA_HOME variable: 
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk

Maven

You must install Maven.

Once you have installed Homebrew, you can install maven by opening a terminal window and enter:

brew install maven

You can test Maven is correctly installed and can find java using the following command:

mvn -v

Installing OR-Tools

Take the following steps to install the OR-Tools library for Java:

Download and extract the binary distribution for your system:

FlatZinc binary distributions

FlatZinc is a solver input language understood by a wide range of solvers.
OR-Tools also provides binary distributions with FlatZinc support:

Validate your installation

To test your Java installations, open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where you unpacked the binary distribution. Then enter the following command:

make test_java

This runs a selection of examples for OR-Tools. If all the examples run successfully, you are ready to get started with OR-Tools.