Using OR-Tools Pip for Python

This guide provides instructions for installing and running OR-Tools, a powerful optimization library, specifically on MacOS with Python 3.8+.
Before installing OR-Tools, ensure you have Homebrew and Python 3.8+ installed on your system, following the provided commands for installation and verification.
Install OR-Tools using pip, either for your user or system-wide, and download the example code from the GitHub repository to get started.
Run the provided "basic_example.py" file using Python 3 to verify your installation and explore a basic application of OR-Tools.
Once you've completed these steps, you'll be ready to delve deeper into OR-Tools and utilize its capabilities for optimization tasks.

Introduction

This guide gets you started with OR-Tools in Python with a simple working example.

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 -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.

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

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.