Installing OR-Tools for Java from Binary on MacOS

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for installing Google's OR-Tools library for Java on MacOS versions 13.0.1 (Ventura) for both Intel and M1 architectures.
Before installing OR-Tools, ensure you have the necessary prerequisites: Xcode Command Line Tools, Homebrew, Java JDK 8.0 or higher, and Maven, all of which can be installed using the terminal commands provided.
OR-Tools can be installed by downloading the appropriate binary distribution for your system (Intel or M1), extracting it, and then validating the installation by running a test suite using the make test command.
After successful installation and validation, you can begin utilizing OR-Tools for your optimization tasks by referring to the provided introductory resources.

Introduction

This guide explains how to install OR-Tools for Java on MacOS.

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

Take the following steps to install the OR-Tools library for Java:

Download and extract the binary distribution for your system:

Validate your installation

To test your Java installations, open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where you unpacked the binary distribution. Then enter the following command:

make test

This runs a selection of examples for OR-Tools. If all the examples run successfully, you are ready to get started with OR-Tools.