/bio/skills/blog/math

Running GAP via Devbox on MacOS

Devbox is a pretty great interface for Nix. It allows nicely sandboxed environments for running various programming languages, services, databases, and other software. Recently, I've been playing with GAP (GAP - Groups, Algorithms, Programming), a program to do abstract algebra. I installed it in a devbox shell:

devbox add gap-full

However, when running it, I got an error about dynamic library paths. Taking a cue from Apple's Developer Documentation, I added the following to my devbox.json:

"env": {
    "DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH": "$DEVBOX_PACKAGES_DIR/lib"
  },

That's it! Now I can run GAP!


Note: Although Apple's docuemntation indicated that any of LD_LIBRARY_PATH should also would work, in my case, it did not. I didn't try using DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH.

2025 Stefano De Vuono