The JupyterKernel GAP package

This package implements the Jupyter protocol in GAP.

Installation

Note: If you need to reinstall this package, you will also need to re-run pip3 install ., and re-add the Jupyter kernel to your PATH

Dependencies and installation

Download and unpack the corresponding archive from the GAP website at

https://www.gap-system.org/Releases/

For Windows installations, it is recommended to utilise an installation of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as this makes the installation process much more streamlined. JupyterKernel does not require compilation, but it depends on several other GAP packages, of which several have to be built and require the following dependencies:

• libzmq3-dev
• m4

Jupyter Setup

Jupyter can be installed using the following:

pip3 install notebook

in your terminal (or for Windows, under WSL’s terminal). While other methods do work for installing python, this method has been tested to work well with JupyterKernel.

Note that a Python version >= 3.5 is required. Once that is done, the GAP Jupyter kernel must be registered with Jupyter, by running the following command in the pkg/JupyterKernel directory of your GAP installation:

pip3 install .

or for your user only:

pip3 install . --user

Adding JupyterKernel to your PATH

If GAP is not in your PATH, then you have to set the environment variable JUPYTER_GAP_EXECUTABLE to point to your GAP executable for Jupyter to be able to execute GAP, and the script jupyter-kernel-gap that is distributed with this package in the directory bin/ needs to be in your path.

This can be done through symlinking:

sudo ln -s <GAP-installation-directory>/bin/gap.sh gap
  
sudo ln -s <GAP-installation-directory>/pkg/JupyterKernel-X.Y.Z/bin/jupyter-kernel-gap

And an export command to set JUPYTER_GAP_EXECUTABLE:

export JUPYTER_GAP_EXECUTABLE=gap

Running JupyterKernel

With all of the setup complete, you should be able to start Jupyter notebook with

jupyter notebook

and chose GAP as a kernel option.

Troubleshooting

If you have registered the GAP Jupyter kernel, but it does not start, open GAP and enter

LoadPackage("JupyterKernel");

If this returns fail, follow the displayed instructions to attempt loading it second time with a more verbose output in order to find out which of the dependencies fail to load, and check their installation. If this returns true but it still does not work in Jupyter, check that you have set the environment variable JUPYTER_GAP_EXECUTABLE and the script jupyter-kernel-gap is in your path as described above. For some more details, see https://github.com/gap-packages/JupyterKernel/issues/74.

Documentation

Information and documentation can be found in the manual, available as PDF doc/manual.pdf or as HTML doc/chap0_mj.html, or on the package homepage at

https://gap-packages.github.io/JupyterKernel/

Bug reports and feature requests

Please submit bug reports and feature requests via our GitHub issue tracker:

https://github.com/gap-packages/JupyterKernel/issues

License

JupyterKernel is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the BSD 3-clause license.

For details see the files COPYRIGHT.md and LICENSE.

Acknowledgement

This infrastructure is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 676541.