Installing pymatbridge on Windows

Question

In version 0.3 of pymatbridge, an additional dependency was added for ZMQ. To install this version, you might therefore need to compile a messenger mex extensio

Answer 1

Here's my setup and build instructions; apologies for the verbosity -- this is from a write-up I did for my lab notebook.

Specifications:

Windows 8.1 (64 bit)
Anaconda 1.9.1
python 2.7.6
MinGW
TDM GCC 4.8.1

First I installed MS Visual C++ & SDK 7.1. Possible reason for the install to fail quite early on is the presence of other Visual C++ compiler versions and/or SDKs -- before successfully installing SDK 7.1 I had to uninstall quite a few of them.

First, using the Windows SDK 7.1 Command Prompt, I

mex -setup

and selected the newly installed compiler. In my case

Select a compiler:
[1] Microsoft Software Development Kit (SDK) 7.1 in 
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0

[0] None

Compiler:

I elected to pick number 1. Next I downloaded and installed a prebuilt 64 bit ZMQ 3.2.4, and from the ZMQ 3.2.4 install location, C:\Program Files\ZeroMQ 3.2.4\lib, I copied libzmq-v90-mt_3_2_4.lib, and libzmq-v90-mt_3_2_4.dll from C:\Program Files\ZeroMQ 3.2.4\bin to the messenger build directory, ~\python-matlab-bridge\messenger\src. I also put zmq.h and zmq_utils.h into that directory but as of now am unsure if they are really necessary.

Then, in the Windows SDK 7.1 Command Prompt, I cded into the messenger\src directory and issued

mex messenger.c libzmq-v90-mt-3_2_4.lib -O -output messenger

to obtain a messenger.mexw64. Finally, in the ~\python-matlab-bridge directory, using MinGW, I just

python setup.py install

This automatically put the built package into my Anaconda\Lib\site-packages along with an egg info. In Anaconda\Lib\site-packages\pymatbridge\matlab there is the messenger.mexw64 that was built earlier -- from ~\python-matlab-bridge\messenger\src. I also copied to Anaconda\Lib\site-packages\pymatbridge\matlab all other .dlls, .libs and .hs for good measure. Now in the iPython 2.7 console, or an iPython Notebook, I can

%load_ext pymatbridge

successfully.