Installation

The following steps work installing the dependencies in Linux via apt-get or in macOS using brew or macports. While using packages managers such as Anaconda, Miniforge, or Mamba might work, these are not tested. The supported Python versions are 3.11 to 3.14.

ResInsight and plopm are used for the visualization of the results.

Note

There are binary packages for Linux and Windows to install Resinsight, see the ResInsight Documentation. For macOS users, you could try to install it using brew by executing:

brew install cssr-tools/opm/resinsight

Then, you should be able to open resinsight by typing in the terminal resinsight.

Python package

To install the pyopmspe11 executable from the development version:

pip install git+https://github.com/opm/pyopmspe11.git

If you are interested in a specific version (e.g., v2025.10) or in modifying the source code, then you can clone the repository and install the Python requirements in a virtual environment with the following commands:

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/opm/pyopmspe11.git
# Get inside the folder
cd pyopmspe11
# For a specific version (e.g., v2025.10), or skip this step (i.e., edge version)
git checkout v2025.10
# Create virtual environment (to specific Python, python3.13 -m venv vpyopmspe11)
python3 -m venv vpyopmspe11
# Activate virtual environment
source vpyopmspe11/bin/activate
# Upgrade pip, setuptools, and wheel
pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
# Install the pyopmspe11 package
pip install -e .
# For contributions/testing/linting, install the dev-requirements
pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

Tip

Typing git tag -l writes all available specific versions.

Note

For not macOS users, to install the (optional but recommended) dependencies used for the figure’s LaTeX formatting, execute

sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra dvipng cm-super

For macOS users, the LaTeX dependency can be installed from https://www.tug.org/mactex/.

OPM Flow

You also need to install:

Binary packages

See the downloading and installing OPM Flow online documentation for instructions to install the binary packages in Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and for other platforms which are supported either via source builds or through running a virtual machine.

Tip

See the CI.yml script for installation of OPM Flow (binary packages), LaTeX (optional) libraries, and the pyopmspe11 package in Ubuntu.

Source build in Linux/Windows

If you are a Linux user (including the Windows subsystem for Linux, see this link for a nice tutorial for setting Python environments in WSL), then you could try to build flow (after installing the prerequisites) from the master branches with mpi support by running in the terminal the following lines (which in turn should build flow in the folder ./build/opm-simulators/bin/flow):

CURRENT_DIRECTORY="$PWD"

mkdir build

for repo in common grid simulators
do  git clone https://github.com/OPM/opm-$repo.git
    mkdir build/opm-$repo
    cd build/opm-$repo
    cmake -DWITH_NDEBUG=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release $CURRENT_DIRECTORY/opm-$repo
    if [[ $repo == simulators ]]; then
        make -j5 flow
    else
        make -j5 opm$repo
    fi
    cd ../..
done

Tip

You can create a .sh file (e.g., build_opm_mpi.sh), copy the previous lines, and run in the terminal source build_opm_mpi.sh

Brew formula for macOS

For macOS, there are no available binary packages, so OPM Flow needs to be built from source. Recently, a formula to build flow using brew has been added in https://github.com/cssr-tools/homebrew-opm. Then, you can try to install flow (v2026.02) by simply typing:

brew install cssr-tools/opm/opm-simulators

You can check if the installation of OPM Flow succeded by typing in the terminal flow --help.

Tip

See the actions in the cssr-tools/homebrew-opm repository.

Source build in macOS

See this repository dedicated to build OPM Flow from source in the latest macOS (GitHub actions), and tested with pycopm, a repository in cssr-tools.