install METIS library for python3 on windows7

Question

I want to install METIS for python3.6 on windows7.I did the following steps:

1-Download the source (tar.gz or zip file) from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/networkx-metis/

2-Unpack and change directory to the source directory (it should have the setup.py on top level).

3-Run

python setup.py build

to build

in this step, I encountered the following error:

error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required.

i installed "Visual Studio Tools 2017", Then I run the code again. I encountered the following error:

error: command 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio 
14.0\\VC\\BIN\\cl.exe' failed with exit status 2

I would be very grateful if you answer my questions.

Answer 1

Although what I used was Windows 10, perhaps the same steps as I laid out here may work for you.

First, you should get the python metis wrapper using pip: pip install metis.

Second, you must install conda-metis, which you can find here. Note, it does not require you to install Anaconda to work.

Place the files in conda-metis-master in some file path.

The installation requires some fixes. Make sure you have a recent version of Visual Studios (I used 2017). For me, VS had a problem running the instructions in BUILD-WINDOWS.txt, which landed me on this thread:

Why does MSBuild look in C:\ for Microsoft.Cpp.Default.props instead of c:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild? ( error MSB4019)

Specifically, the answer For Visual Studio 2017 and 2019 on Windows 10 was what I went with. It could potentially be different for you since you are on Windows 7.

For the python metis package, we need to generate a metis.dll, not a metis.lib file, so we must also look closer at the CMakeLists.txt (see the Linux version of this discussion here). We add on line 19: set(METIS_LIBRARY_TYPE SHARED).

You should follow the BUILD-WINDOWS.txt instructions, but run .\vsgen -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" inside your conda-metis file path in command prompt with full permissions instead of using Visual Studio 10.

Before moving on to using the files that were generated by the above command in path_to_your_metis_dir\build\windows\, we need another fix. Following what was said in:

rint() issue after creating VS Project using CMake

we have to edit the file path_to_your_metis_dir\GKlib\gk_arch.h by removing the line: #define rint(x) ((idx_t)((x)+0.5)). (Or the fix listed on this github exchange.)

Then go to path_to_your_metis_dir\build\windows\.

Open METIS.sln in Visual Studios, go to the top to Build and from the scroll-down go to Build Solution. Afterwards, the .dll file will be in path_to_your_metis_dir\build\windows\libmetis\Release\.

Last, we run in command prompt: set METIS_DLL=path_to_your_metis_dir\build\windows\libmetis\Release\metis.dll

After this, python metis no longer failed when I would import it into my code with the step from metis import *.