Install HiGHS

Install via a package manager

HiGHS can be installed using a package manager in the cases of Julia, Python, and Rust.

Precompiled Binaries

These binaries are provided by the Julia community and are not officially supported by the HiGHS development team. If you have trouble using these libraries, please open a GitHub issue and tag @odow in your question.

Precompiled static executables are available for a variety of platforms at

Multiple versions are available. Each version has the form vX.Y.Z. In general, you should choose the most recent versinon.

To install a precompiled binary, download the appropriate HiGHSstatic.vX.Y.Z.[platform-string].tar.gz file and extract the executable located at /bin/highs.

Do not download the file starting with HiGHSstatic-logs. These files contain information from the automated compilation system. Click "Show all N assets" to see more files.

Platform strings

The GitHub releases contain precompiled binaries for a number of different platforms. These are indicated by the platform-specific string in each filename.

  • For Windows users: choose the file ending in x86_64-w64-mingw32-cxx11.tar.gz
  • For M1 macOS users: choose the file ending in aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
  • For Intel macOS users: choose the file ending in x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz

Compile from source

HiGHS uses CMake as build system, and requires at least version 3.15. After extracting HiGHS from GitHub, setup a build folder and call CMake as follows:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..

Then compile the code using:

$ cmake --build .

To test whether the compilation was successful, run

$ ctest

HiGHS is installed using the command

$ cmake --install .

This installs the library in lib/, as well as all header files in include/highs/. For a custom installation in install_folder run

$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=install_folder .

and then

$ cmake --install .

To use the library from a CMake project use

find_package(HiGHS)

and add the correct path to HIGHS_DIR.

Windows

By default, CMake builds the debug version of the binaries. These are generated in a directory Debug. To build a release version, add the option --config Release

    cmake -S . -B build
    cmake --build build --config Release

It is also possible to specify a specific Visual studio version to build with:

    cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -S . -B build
    cmake --build build

When building under Windows, some extra options are available. One is building a 32 bit version or a 64 bit version. The default build is 64 bit. To build 32 bit, the following commands can be used from the HiGHS/ directory:

    cmake -A Win32 -S . -DFAST_BUILD=OFF -B buildWin32
    cmake --build buildWin32

Another thing specific for windows is the calling convention, particularly important for the HiGHS dynamic library (dll). The default calling convention in windows is cdecl calling convention, however, dlls are most often compiled with stdcall. Most applications which expect stdcall, can't access dlls with cdecl and vice versa. To change the default calling convention from cdecl to stdcall the following option can be added

    cmake -DSTDCALL=ON -S . -DFAST_BUILD=OFF -B build
    cmake --build build

An extra note. With the legacy -DFAST_BUILD=OFF, under windows the build dll is called highs.dll however the exe expects libhighs.dll so a manual copy of highs.dll to libhighs.dll is needed. Of course all above options can be combined with each other.