## Introduction

This guide gets you started with OR-Tools in Python with a simple working
example.

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 Enterprise 2022
- Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2022 Preview 2 or above

<br />

## Prerequisites

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

### Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable

You must have the
[Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2022](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/?q=Visual+C%2B%2B+Redistributable+for+Visual+Studio) (select the x64 version) installed
on your computer, since OR-Tools library for Python is a wrapper for the
C++ native library.

### Python

You must have one of the following versions of Python installed:

- [Python 3.11.x 64-bit](https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110/)
- [Python 3.10.x 64-bit](https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3100/)
- [Python 3.9.x 64-bit](https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-390/)
- [Python 3.8.x 64-bit](https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-380/)

Then verify that you have pip 9.01 or higher available in your PATH:

    python --version
    python -c "import platform; print(platform.architecture()[0])"
    python -m pip --version

## Installing OR-Tools

Assuming the prerequisite software is installed on your Windows, take the following steps:

    python3 -m pip install -U --user ortools

Or, to install it system wide:

    sudo python3 -m pip install -U ortools

### Uninstalling OR-Tools

To uninstall OR-Tools, issue the following commands:

    python3 -m pip uninstall ortools

## Get the Python example code

The example code is located in the
[python_or-tools](https://github.com/or-tools/python_or-tools) repository.

1. [Download the repository as a zip file](https://github.com/or-tools/python_or-tools/archive/v9.12.zip)
   and extract it, or clone the repository:

       git clone -b v9.12 --depth 1 https://github.com/or-tools/python_or-tools

2. Change to the examples directory:

       cd python_or-tools

## Run the example

From the `python_or-tools` directory:

Run the binary using:


    python3 basic_example.py

<br />

Congratulations! You've just run an application with OR-Tools, you are ready to
[get started with OR-Tools](https://developers.google.com/optimization/introduction/python).