Installation

The latest version of GAP is 4.14.0 released on 05 December 2024. For an overview of changes see the CHANGES.md file.

There are several ways to install GAP:

More detailed instructions can be found in INSTALL.md.

GAP may compile and work for you on other systems, and if so we would be interested to know about it. Moreover, it is also possible to use GAP via a free account on CoCalc. The combination of GAP packages available there may differ from the one from the official GAP distribution; however, the maintainers of CoCalc would love to hear about any additional packages you would like to be installed or any questions you might have (email help@cocalc.com).

Getting Started

If you followed all instruction steps you can test you installation as described below. If it works and you are new to GAP you may try to start reading and trying the examples in the first chapters of the Tutorial [PDF version]. In particular, it is explained how to use the extensive documentation from inside GAP.

Testing the Installation

For a quick test of your installation you may start GAP. Normally, you will see a GAP 4 banner and the information about loaded components and packages. This information may vary depending on your installation. For example, for the complete installation of latest versions of all packages you will have something like:

 ┌───────┐   GAP 4.14.0 of 2024-12-05
 │  GAP  │   https://www.gap-system.org
 └───────┘   Architecture: aarch64-apple-darwin21-default64-kv9
 Configuration:  gmp 6.3.0, GASMAN, readline
 Loading the library and packages ...
 Packages:   AClib 1.3.2, Alnuth 3.2.1, AtlasRep 2.1.9, AutPGrp 1.11,
             Browse 1.8.21, CaratInterface 2.3.7, CRISP 1.4.6, Cryst 4.1.27,
             CrystCat 1.1.10, CTblLib 1.3.9, curlInterface 2.4.0, FactInt 1.6.3,
             FGA 1.5.0, Forms 1.2.12, GAPDoc 1.6.7, genss 1.6.9, IO 4.9.1,
             IRREDSOL 1.4.4, LAGUNA 3.9.7, orb 4.9.1, Polenta 1.3.10,
             Polycyclic 2.16, PrimGrp 3.4.4, RadiRoot 2.9, recog 1.4.3,
             ResClasses 4.7.3, SmallGrp 1.5.4, Sophus 1.27, SpinSym 1.5.2,
             StandardFF 1.0, TomLib 1.2.11, TransGrp 3.6.5, utils 0.85
 Try '??help' for help. See also '?copyright', '?cite' and '?authors'
gap>

Now you may type a few commands at the prompt and run a short test suite (which will run for up to a few minutes, depending on the speed of your computer). If you observe any discrepancies, see the next section.

gap> 3^80;
147808829414345923316083210206383297601
gap> tst := Filename( DirectoriesLibrary("tst"), "testinstall.g" );;
gap> Read(tst);
Architecture: aarch64-apple-darwin21-default64-kv9

testing: /Users/mhorn/gap/tst/testinstall/ConjNatSym.tst
      35 ms (4 ms GC) and 23.8MB allocated for ConjNatSym.tst
testing: /Users/mhorn/gap/tst/testinstall/DirectProductElement.tst
      33 ms (30 ms GC) and 684KB allocated for DirectProductElement.tst
testing: /Users/mhorn/gap/tst/testinstall/ElmsBlist.tst
      36 ms (27 ms GC) and 4.33MB allocated for ElmsBlist.tst

[...  more lines deleted]

testing: /Users/mhorn/gap/tst/testinstall/zmodnz.tst
      60 ms (54 ms GC) and 2.23MB allocated for zmodnz.tst
testing: /Users/mhorn/gap/tst/testinstall/zmodnze.tst
      59 ms (57 ms GC) and 1.33MB allocated for zmodnze.tst
-----------------------------------
total     34300 ms (14129 ms GC) and 10.1GB allocated
              0 failures in 296 files

#I  No errors detected while testing

If Things Go Wrong

If you encounter problems with the above steps, please try the following - in this order:

Upgrading

If you have any version of GAP older than the current version, the only way to install a new version of GAP is a new installation. If you installed GAP from the standard distribution and have not manually installed additional or updated packages in your GAP distribution (which is no longer necessary – instead we recommend that you install them in the user specific GAP root directory) then you can always upgrade to the latest version of GAP by moving the old version aside and downloading and installing the current archives, and this is the approach we recommend for most users. Make sure that you update any scripts or links to refer to the new version.