Installing CBC on MacOS

Update May 2022: Using the coinbrew approach as documented here works now out of the box.

Today I needed to install CBC on MacOS and it was not a walk in the park, unfortunately.

Yes, there is a brew package which makes installation trivial. However, this only installs a single-threaded version of CBC. Not good!

One of the greatest selling points of CBC is multithreading. This makes CBC a contender for serious optimization tasks in MIP programming.

TLDR

I will save you all the searching and try-and-error and give you the recipe straight:

Use coinbrew to build CBC yourself

# Get Build Environment
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coin-or/coinbrew/master/coinbrew
chmod 755 coinbrew

# Build CBC
./coinbrew fetch Cbc
./coinbrew build Cbc --prefix /path/to/cbc --test --enable-cbc-parallel
./coinbrew install Cbc

Note the --enable-cbc-parallel flag. If you forget it you will end up with another singe-threaded version.

Now you are settled. Just make sure that CBC is in your path and you set the library paths accordingly:

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/cbc/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/cbc/lib
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/cbc/lib

Summary

Not too difficult when you know what to do. But documentation is sparse so hopefully this article will save you time.