Installing OR-Tools for Python from Binary on Windows

 Introduction

This guide explains how to install OR-Tools for Python on Windows.

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

Note: OR-Tools only supports the x86_64 (also known as amd64) architecture.

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 (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
• Python 3.10.x 64-bit
• Python 3.9.x 64-bit
• Python 3.8.x 64-bit

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:

python -m pip install ortools

Tip: You should install ortools in a virtual environment

Uninstalling OR-Tools

To uninstall OR-Tools, issue the following commands:

python -m pip uninstall ortools

Validate your installation

To test your Python installations, open a x64 Native Tools Command Prompt. Then enter the following command:

python -c "import ortools; print(ortools.__version__)"

If it runs successfully, you are ready to get started with OR-Tools.