OpenSpiel Installation on Windows

OpenSpiel has limited support on Windows and is not being regularly tested, which means support could break at any time. This may change in the future, but for now please be aware that Windows support is experimental. Please report any bugs or problems you encounter.

OpenSpiel has limited support on Windows and is not being regularly tested, which means support could break at any time. This may change in the future (contributions are welcome), with Github Actions supporting windows workers, but for now please be aware that Windows support is experimental. Please report any bugs or problems you encounter.

Option 1: Windows Installation using Visual Studio Community Edition

This option will describe how to install and use OpenSpiel on Windows 10 via Visual Studio Community Edition. This process has been written for Windows 10 and tested on Windows 10 Home Version 20H2, build 19042.1415 (installed on Nov 26th, 2021).

When installing Visual Studio, enable the C++ and Python development, and also the C++ CMake tools for Windows. C++/CLI support and C++ Clang tools may also be useful (but not necessary).

You will need to have the following dependencies installed:

  • CMake

  • git

  • Python. Note: get the latest 3.9 release as OpenSpiel has not been tested on 3.10 yet. Also, tick the box during installation to ensure Python executable is in your path.

  • Recommended: Windows Terminal / Powershell.

The rest of the instructions will assume that OpenSpiel is cloned in C:\Users\MyUser\open_spiel.

Open a Windows Terminal (Windows Powershell), clone OpenSpiel and its dependencies (commands adapted from open_spiel/scripts/install.sh)

cd C:\Users\MyUser
git clone https://github.com/deepmind/open_spiel.git
cd open_spiel
git clone -b smart_holder --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/pybind/pybind11.git pybind11
git clone -b 20211102.0 --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp.git open_spiel\abseil-cpp
git clone -b 'master' https://github.com/pybind/pybind11_abseil.git open_spiel\pybind11_abseil
cd open_spiel\pybind11_abseil
git checkout '73992b5'
cd ..\..
git clone -b develop --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/jblespiau/dds.git open_spiel\games\bridge\double_dummy_solver

Open Visual Studio and continue without code. Then, click on File | Open -> CMake, and choose C:\Users\MyUser\open_spiel\open_spiel\CMakeLists.txt. CMake will then run; once you see CMake generation finished, choose Build -> Build All. The files will be available in C:\Users\MyUser\open_spiel\open_spiel\out\build\x64-Debug, when the build completes with “Build All succeeded.”

To be able to import the Python code (both the C++ binding pyspiel and the rest) from any location, you will need to add to your PYTHONPATH the root directory and the open_spiel directory. Open Windows environment variables and add to the PYTHONPATH. Add the directories C:\Users\MyUser\open_spiel\open_spiel\out\build\x64-Debug and C:\Users\MyUser\open_spiel\open_spiel\out\build\x64-Debug\python to PYTHONPATH. If your PYTHONPATH does not exist, then create a new environment variable for it. To check that python is working, you can run the example in open_spiel\python\examples.

OpenSpiel has various Python dependencies which may require installing. At a minimum, you will need the ones in requirements.txt.

pip install absl-py
pip install attrs
pip install numpy

For a complete list, depending on what you will use, see python_extra_deps.sh.

Option 2: Windows Installation using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

This section describes the installation steps to get OpenSpiel running in a Windows 10 environment using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Note that WSL does not include GPU support, so will run on CPU only.

Process

This process has been written for Windows 10, and tested on Windows 10 build 1903 (March 2019).

  1. Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux:

    Run the following command in Windows Powershell:

    Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
    
  2. Install Ubuntu Linux from the Windows Store. Currently this is version 18.04::

    Open up the Windows Store. Search for Ubuntu. Open up Ubuntu and press “Get” to install this.

  3. First time run of Ubuntu:

    Click on the Start Button and choose the Ubuntu icon. Wait until the distro installs. Provide a username and password for the default user account. Note that this account is a member of the Linux administrators (sudo) group so choose a secure username and password combination.

  4. Update / Upgrade packages (optional step)

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get upgrade
    
  5. Run through the first part of the OpenSpiel installation

    git clone https://github.com/deepmind/open_spiel.git
    cd open_spiel
    ./install.sh # you will be prompted for the password created at stage 3. Press Y to continue and install. During installation press Yes to restart services during package upgrades
    pip install -U pip # Upgrade pip (required for TF >= 1.15)
    pip3 install --upgrade -r requirements.txt # Install Python dependencies
    
  6. Now need to upgrade make version as the version of make which comes with Ubuntu 18.04 is not high enough to build OpenSpiel. (Note, this step won’t be necessary if the version of Ubuntu in the Windows store gets upgraded to 19.04)

    cd ..
    wget http://www.cmake.org/files/v3.12/cmake-3.12.4.tar.gz
    tar -xvzf cmake-3.12.4.tar.gz
    cd cmake-3.12.4/
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install
    sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/cmake cmake /usr/local/bin/cmake 1 --force
    cd ../open_spiel
    
  7. Finally, continue with the installation and run tests.

    mkdir build
    cd build
    CXX=clang++ cmake -DPython3_EXECUTABLE=$(which python3) -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ ../open_spiel
    make -j12 # The 12 here is the number of parallel processes used to build
    ctest -j12 # Run the tests to verify that the installation succeeded
    

    The CMake variable Python3_EXECUTABLE is used to specify the Python interpreter. If the variable is not set, CMake’s FindPython3 module will prefer the latest version installed. Note, Python >= 3.6.0 is required.

    One can run an example of a game running (in the build/ folder):

    ./examples/example --game=tic_tac_toe
    
  8. Setting Your PYTHONPATH environment variable

    To be able to import the Python code (both the C++ binding pyspiel and the rest) from any location, you will need to add to your PYTHONPATH the root directory and the open_spiel directory.

    When using a virtualenv, the following should be added to <virtualenv>/bin/activate. For a system-wide install, add it in your .bashrc or .profile.

    # For the python modules in open_spiel.
    export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/<path_to_open_spiel>
    # For the Python bindings of Pyspiel
    export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/<path_to_open_spiel>/build/python
    
  9. Running the first example

    In the build directory, running examples/example will print out a list of registered games and the usage. Now, let’s play game of Tic-Tac-Toe with uniform random players:

    examples/example --game=tic_tac_toe