OpEn Installation

OpEn Requirements: Rust and clang

Before you start, you need to install

  • Rust, following the official installation guide,
    • Why? The Rust compiler is an essential component of OpEn; you will most likely not need to write (or compile yourself) any Rust code, but OpEn's Python/MATLAB interface will need the compiler to build your optimizer
    • How? Follow the instructions; in a nutshell, on Linux and MacOSX run:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

and add /.cargo/bin to your path - e.g., on Linux, put the following line in your ~/.profile file:

# Add this to your ~/.profile file
export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"

then logout and login again (or restart) for this to take effect.

  • clang, following this guide
    • Why? OpEn uses CasADi to build certain functions in C, which then need to be called from OpEn's core solver in Rust. For that purpose we need bindgen, which requires clang

Python Interface

As simple as

pip install opengen

You might need to prepend sudo on some Linux systems.

Note that OpEn requires Python version 3.5 or newer. You might, therefore, need to install it using

pip3 install opengen

OpEn may run on earlier versions of Python (as old as 2.7), but we cannot promise you that (the main difficulty being the installation of dependencies).

We strongly recommend that you use virtualenv.

Python installation with virtualenv

To install OpEn in a virtual environment, using virtualenv, you first need to create such an environment, then activate it, and lastly, install opengen as above using pip. That is, you need to run:

virtualenv -p python3.6 venv36
source venv36/bin/activate
pip install opengen

MATLAB Interface

You first need to download Optimization Engine, cd to ./matlab/ and run

setup_open

This will include to your MATLAB path all necessary folders.

You also need to download and install CasADi.

OpEn in Rust

To use OpEn in your Rust project, add the following in your project's Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
optimization_engine = "*"

You may replace the asterisk with some particular version (e.g., optimization_engine = "0.6.0"). OpEn is available on crates.io.

Install from source

This section is intended mainly for developers and contributors.

Get the source code: clone and/or fork

The first step is to get the latest version from OpEn's git repository:

git clone \
https://github.com/alphaville/optimization-engine.git \
optimization-engine

To clone a particular branch do

git clone -b <branch_name> \
https://github.com/alphaville/optimization-engine.git \
optimization-engine

If you want to contribute to OpEn, you should rather fork OpEn on github. In that case, you should also read the contributing guide as well.

Install opengen

Go intro optimization-engine/open-codegen and create a virtual environment:

cd optimization-engine/open-codegen
virtualenv -p python3.6 venvopen
source venvopen/bin/activate
python setup.py install

You're ready to go!

It's a good idea to use an IDE, such as PyCharm. Use the above virtual environment (venvopen) in PyCharm:

  • go to Run > Edit Configurations > Add new configuration
  • Script path: specify main.py
  • Working dir: optimization-engine/open-codegen/opengen
  • Python interpreter: venvopen

Install OpEn in Rust

As easy as:

cd optimization-engine
cargo build

If you need to use opengen - the Python interface of OpEn - with a local version of the Rust library, use with_open_version(local_path=...) in your code. Read the advanced options for details.

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