Using OR-Tools Maven for Java

 Introduction

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

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

  • MacOS 13.0.1 (Ventura) Intel 64-bit (x86_64)
  • MacOS 13.0.1 (Ventura) M1 (arm64)

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:

/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

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:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
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 with Maven

To include OR-Tools in your Maven application, add a dependency on its artifacts to your project's pom.xml file. For example,

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.google.ortools/ortools-java -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.ortools</groupId>
    <artifactId>ortools-java</artifactId>
    <version>9.11.4210</version>
</dependency>

Get the Java example code

The example code is located in the java_or-tools repository.

  1. Download the repository as a zip file and extract it, or clone the repository:

    git clone -b v9.11 --depth 1 https://github.com/or-tools/java_or-tools

  2. Change to the examples directory:

    cd java_or-tools

Build the example

From the java_or-tools directory:

Build the project using:

mvn compile -B

Run the example

From the java_or-tools directory:

Run the binary using:

mvn exec:java

Congratulations! You've just run an application with OR-Tools, you are ready to get started with OR-Tools.