Welcome to COIN Help

The information behind these webpages tells you how to obtain most of the packages available on COIN-OR.

If you want to obtain precompiled binaries (executables and libraries), please go to the ​COIN binaries page.

Below you find straight-forward instructions for downloading and compiling the code. More detailed information is available pm-detailed?.

Minimal Download and Installation Instructions

NOTE: Please check the current issues page before trying to configure and compile the code.

The very short version of the download and installation instructions for UNIX-like system (including Linux and Cygwin) is this:

1. Get the code for the desired package Pkg (where Pkg needs to be replaced by the name of the COIN package you want to install) and for a releases x.y.z (again, x.y.z is to be replaced by the version number string, such as 2.4.1):
   • As tarball: Download the tarball Pgk-x.y.z.tgz from the ​COIN Tarballs site and extract it, for example with

     gunzip Pgk-x.y.z.tgz
     tar xvf Pgk-x.y.z.tar
     

   • Via subversion: Go into the directory where you want to have a subdirectory with the downloaded source code and type

     svn co https://projects.coin-or.org/svn/Pkg/releases/x.y.z  Pkg-x.y.z
     

2. Go into the downloaded directory, create a subdirectory for the compiled code, and run the configuration script

   cd Pkg-x.y.z
   mkdir build
   cd build
   ../configure
   

   Make sure the last line of output says that the configuration was successful.
3. Compile the code

   make
   

4. Test the compiled code

   make test
   

5. Install the generated libraries, executables, and header files

   make install
   

This will create subdirectories bin, lib, and include in the download directory with the product of the compilation.

The configure script has many customization features. To learn more about them, go to the Preparing the compilation page.

The COIN-OR FAQ page has a brief explanation of ​how to use a Windows subversion client to download the code. The ​MSVisualStudio project describes how several COIN-OR projects can be built with Microsoft Visual Studio.

If these simple instructions don't work for you, please check for more detailed information?, and visit the Troubleshooting page.