gurobimh: Unofficial Alternative Gurobi/Python Interface

Maintainer Wanted!

As I do not currently use the Gurobi / Python interface, this package is orphaned. Anyone willing to further maintain it, please contact me!

Overview

gurobimh is a drop-in replacement for the gurobipy API bindings shipped with Gurobi. It offers several advantages:

• gurobimh can be compiled for all current versions of Python; you do not need to rely on Gurobi officially supporting your desired Python version.
• gurobimh's performance is much better, especially when modifying models a lot (like in a hand-written branch and bound solver).
• gurobimh is free software an can be easily extended.
• gurobimh ships a Cython pxd files, and the Model class has some fast-access cdef member methods for model modifications or queries than circumvent some of the slower API parts. This means that, if you are writing your algorithms in Cython, you can almost achieve the performance of the C interface, but using a much cleaner API.

Of course, there are also disatvantages:

• Up to now, gurobimh supports only a subset of the official gurobipy API, in particular quadratic programming is not yet supported, and lots of parameters are missing. However these features are easy to implement once you look at how the others are, so you are welcome to contribute. Simply put, I have only implemented the features I am using myself.
• Though I have successfully verified that gurobimh behaves like gurobipy for my programs, there are probably lots of bugs, and of course there's no commercial support. Don't use in productive environments!

News

• June 2016: Large update contributed by mikenehme, many thanks for your help!!

Requirements

The API is written in Python. To compile it, you need Cython. Of course, you need to have Gurobi installed, and the GUROBI_HOME environment variable needs to be set correctly.

The current version supports Gurobi 6.5 only (due to some internal API changes in Gurobi, 6.0 is NOT supported anymore).

Installation

Install directly from the Python Package Index with

pip install gurobimh

Alternatively, download the package and type:

python setup.py install

Both commands can be appended by the --user option which locally installs gurobimh for the current user without needing root privileges.

Usage

Simply replace any gurobipy import statements with gurobimh. If anything goes wrong, file a bug!

Contact

Please contact me or use the GitHub features for PRs, comments, bugs etc.