Installing OR-Tools for Python from Binary on MacOS

This guide provides instructions for installing Google's OR-Tools for Python on MacOS systems, specifically tested on MacOS 13.0.1 (Ventura) with Intel or M1 processors.
Before installing OR-Tools, ensure you have Homebrew and Python 3.8+ installed on your system, following the provided instructions.
To install OR-Tools, simply run the command python3 -m pip install ortools in your terminal, ideally within a virtual environment.
You can validate your installation by executing python3 -c "import ortools; print(ortools.__version__)", which should display the installed OR-Tools version.

Introduction

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

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)

Python

You must have Python 3.8+ installed.

To install Python 3.8+, open a terminal window and enter:

brew install python
python3 -m pip install -U --user wheel six

Then verify your installation:

python3 --version
python3 -c "import platform; print(platform.architecture()[0])"
python3 -m pip --version

Assuming the prerequisite software is installed on your MacOS, take the following steps:

python3 -m pip install ortools

Uninstalling OR-Tools

To uninstall OR-Tools, issue the following commands:

python3 -m pip uninstall ortools

Validate your installation

To test your Python installations, open a terminal window. Then enter the following command:

python3 -c "import ortools; print(ortools.__version__)"

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