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Tools needed to install GAP from source

Installing the GAP distribution with all the packages and full data libraries from source code (as opposed to via e.g. the Windows binary installer for GAP) requires a working C and C++ development environment on your system as well as GNU make. You will also need the GMP library; most, but not all standard development environments include this. Furthermore, if the GNU readline library is detected on your system at compile time, it will be used for command line editing.

On macOS, you need to install the Apple developer tools. If you are on macOS 10.11 or newer, this can be achieved by opening a terminal window and entering the command xcode-select --install. A window will appear asking you whether you would like to install the command line developer tools. Confirm this by clicking the “Install” button. After this completed, you can verify that it worked by verifying that the directory /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/ exists and contains executables such as clang and clang++.

Since Windows binaries for GAP and some packages are contained in the GAP installer for Windows, you do not need to install any additional tools for Windows. However, if you want to try to build binaries for more packages, you may install Cygwin to get a UNIX environment for Windows, selecting all needed tools during Cygwin installation.

To install development tools on a Linux system, use your preferred package manager (e.g. apt-get or aptitude or Synaptic etc.). For example, on Ubuntu or Debian we suggest that you call

  sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf libtool libgmp-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev

before calling configure in the GAP root directory.

To get maximum benefit from GAP and from various packages it may be useful to install a number of other free software libraries (and their associated development tools) although they are not required for basic operation. For example,

Browse
needs the ncurses library (e.g. libncurses5-dev and libncursesw5-dev);
nq
needs some version of awk (e.g. gawk or mawk);
FR
may need wget;
XGAP
requires the following X11 libraries: libXaw, libXmu, libXt, libXext, libX11, libSM, and libICE (e.g. libx11-dev, libxaw7-dev, libxt-dev which possibly aready install the other four libxmu-dev, libxext-dev, libsm-dev, libice-dev);

Other packages not listed here may have additional requirements listed in their documentation.