Installing Minion

The main Minion website is http://github.com/minion/minion/, and this contains links to the download page. Currently, executables with and without debug information are provided for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Installation instructions for Windows

Download the Windows archive minion-x.y.z-windows.tar.gz and unpack, you should find Minion executable minion.exe. The executable should work from the Windows command shell cmd.exe.

Installation instructions for Mac

Download the Mac archive minion-x.y.z-mac.tar.gz and unpack.

Installation instructions for Linux

Download the Linux archive minion-x.y.z-linux.tar.gz and unpack.

Compilation instructions

If there is no executable which works on your computer, you can use the source package (named minion-x.y.z-source.tar.gz).

Minion requires a reasonably up-to-date C++ compiler, and Python. Python is only used during the building process.

To compile, create a new directory for the build, and issue the following commands:

<path/to/source>/configure.py
make

where <path/to/minion> is the path to the Minion distribution (the directory which contains configure.py).

The configure.py script takes a variety of options, which are listed with --help. We give the most important ones here:

  • --quick: Make the compiling faster, at the cost of a slower executable

  • --debug: Enable many debugging related options (this will make Minion much slower, but adds many extra internal checks)

  • --compiler: Set the name of the compiler to use (this should be the name of the executable)

  • --assertions: Enable internal assertion checks (implied by --debug)

  • --sanitize: Compile with Clang sanitizers (address, undefined behaviour)

  • --domains64: Use 64-bit integers for domain values (default is 32-bit)

  • --wdeg yes|no: Enable or disable weighted degree heuristics (default yes)

  • --constraints <list>: Build only the named constraints, reducing binary size and compile time. Takes a comma-separated list of constraint names.

  • --buildsystem <name>: Set the build system. Supported values are make (default), tup, and bat (Windows batch).

  • --static: Build a statically linked executable.

  • --extraflags <flags>: Append extra compiler flags.

  • --setflags <flags>: Override all compiler flags.

  • --unoptimised: Disable compiler optimisation.

  • --profile: Add profiling compiler flags.

Once the minion executable is created, you can copy it anywhere you like.

On all platforms, Minion needs to be run from a command shell so that the output can be seen. If you go to the Minion directory in a shell and run the executable, it should output version information and a help message.

Rust interface (minion-sys)

Minion also ships with minion-sys, a Rust crate that wraps the Minion solver as a library. It provides a Rust API for building models, registering tuple tables, running search, and collecting solutions — including mid-search callbacks for modifying models during search. See the minion-sys/README.md file in the source tree for details.