glpsol

The stand-alone solver of the GNU Linear Programming Kit (GLPK), distributed as an R package.

glpsol reads MathProg (GMPL) models with separate data files, CPLEX LP files and MPS files, solves them with the simplex, interior-point or branch-and-cut methods, and writes the solution to a file. This package builds and installs the executable, runs it from R as a separate process with a time limit and an optional live log, and reads the solution file back into R.

Installation

install.packages("glpsol")

On Windows and macOS the CRAN binary contains a static copy of GLPK; no other software needs to be installed or placed on the PATH. On Linux the package is installed from source and requires the GLPK development files:

sudo apt-get install libglpk-dev      # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dnf install glpk-devel           # Fedora/RHEL
brew install glpk                     # macOS, source installation only

The development version is installed from GitHub under the same requirements:

pak::pak("optimal2050/glpsol")

Usage

library(glpsol)

glpsol_path()    # the bundled executable
glpk_version()   # the version of the GLPK library the package was built against

mod <- system.file("models", "transp.mod", package = "glpsol")
sol <- tempfile(fileext = ".txt")
glp <- tempfile(fileext = ".glp")
res <- glpsol_run(c("-m", mod, "-w", sol, "--wglp", glp), echo = FALSE)

res$status       # 0 when glpsol ran to completion
tail(res$log, 3)

s <- glpsol_read_solution(sol, names = glp)
s$status
s$objective
s$cols[, c("name", "primal", "dual")]

glpsol_run() accepts the arguments of the glpsol command line. With echo = TRUE the solver log is written to the console as it is produced; timeout terminates the run after a given number of seconds on all platforms and applies to the whole run, including model translation and output. glpsol_read_solution() reads the solution written with -w into data frames, with row and column names taken from the problem file written with --wglp.

The vignette, vignette("glpsol"), describes the package in more detail.

Use from other packages

glpsol_path() is the integration point. The following function uses the bundled executable when the package is installed and otherwise falls back to a copy found on the PATH:

find_glpsol <- function() {
  if (requireNamespace("glpsol", quietly = TRUE)) {
    hit <- tryCatch(glpsol::glpsol_path(), error = function(e) NULL)
    if (!is.null(hit) && file.exists(hit)) return(hit)
  }
  Sys.which("glpsol")
}

Relation to other packages

glpkAPI, the R binding to the GLPK C API, was archived from CRAN in March 2026. This package fills the resulting gap at the command-line level: it provides GLPK through install.packages() and runs MathProg models with separate data files from R. The solver runs in a separate process and the results are returned through files; the package does not provide an interface to the C API.

Two alternatives remain for that purpose:

• Rglpk links the same library and solves a matrix-level LP in-process with Rglpk_solve_LP(). It reads a single MathProg file but not separate -d data files, and writes no solution files.
• glpkAPI can still be installed from the CRAN archive against a system GLPK installation and provides the full API, including named rows and columns, sensitivity analysis and callbacks.

Licence

GPL-3. The package includes the glpsol driver source from GLPK 5.0, copyright Free Software Foundation, Inc.; see inst/COPYRIGHTS. GLPK itself is distributed under GPL-3.