Using OR-Tools Pip for Python

  • This guide provides instructions for installing and running OR-Tools, a Python library for optimization, on a Windows 64-bit system with specified prerequisites.

  • Before installing OR-Tools, ensure you have the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2022 (x64 version) and a compatible 64-bit Python version (3.8.x, 3.9.x, 3.10.x, or 3.11.x) with pip 9.01 or higher.

  • OR-Tools can be installed using pip with the command python3 -m pip install -U --user ortools (user-specific) or sudo python3 -m pip install -U ortools (system-wide).

  • You can run a basic OR-Tools example by downloading the python_or-tools repository, navigating to the examples directory, and executing python3 basic_example.py.

 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

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:

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 repository.

  1. Download the repository as a zip file 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

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