Using OR-Tools Pip for Python

 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 v9.11 --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.