Installing Python wrapper for METIS: Cannot locate METIS_DLL shared library

Question

I am planning to use Metis for drawing some networks and graphs using Python 2.7. I downloaded Metis from here. I compiled and installed the source code without any problems. For installing the Python wrapper, I followed the instructions given here, but when I run the easy_install command like:

$ easy_install metis

I get this error:

RuntimeError: Could not locate METIS dll. Please set the METIS_DLL environment variable to its full path.

From the second link above, I understand that I have to specify the full path to some 'METIS shared library' file in the METIS_DLL environment variable. But I don't know what the file is called and where it is located or how I should specify the path in an environment variable.

According to my research on Google, I found out that the file might be called 'libmetis.so' but I don't have any file of that name in /usr/local/lib or /usr/lib or /opt. Could someone give me a clue on this?

I am working on Mac OS X 10.6.8, with Python 2.7.3.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

You might need to add "shared=1" to your config options when building Metis from source so it builds a shared library instead of a static one.

make config shared=1
make install

Then, set up your METIS_DLL environment variable:

export METIS_DLL=/usr/local/lib/libmetis.dylib

Source: http://metis.readthedocs.org/en/latest/_modules/metis.html