2022-10-10

Installing .ado files in general–psacalc2 in particular.

Part of an on going series answering questions that I get via email. Installation comes up rather often since I have a fork of psacalc on my github page, unoriginally named psacalc2, that allows folks to use psacalc with reghdfe. My contribution is pretty minor. psacalc allows use of areg and is written mostly in pure Stata (as opposed to Mata or C) so it was straightforward to make a few tweaks to allow use with reghdfe. Since I’m not distributing this via SSC (given that my edits are minor that would be a bit presumptuous), folks often struggle to install psacalc2. So here’s a quick rundown on how to install .ado files:

There are two main ways to get .ado files onto your machine so that Stata knows what you are talking about when you use them.

1. ssc install

The most common way to install .ado files is with the ssc install command. This is super straightforward, and you don’t even need to know what it does for it to work. This is how most folks probably install psacalc.

ssc install psacalc

A more general version of this is net install. Another approach is the github command (itself available via ssc install github).

If you need to find an .ado file on your machine, for example psacalc, passing which psacalc to the interpreter will return the following:

/Users/arthurmorris/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/plus/p/psacalc.ado
*! psacalc 2.1 12May2017

2. place the .ado file in the “adopath”

The “adopath” is just a list of locations where Stata expects to find .ado files. If you pass adopath to the interpreter Stata will reply by telling you where it is looking for .ado files. The defaults will look something like this:

[1]  (BASE)      "/Applications/Stata/ado/base/"
[2]  (SITE)      "/Applications/Stata/ado/site/"
[3]              "."
[4]  (PERSONAL)  "/Users/arthurmorris/Documents/Stata/ado/personal/"
[5]  (PLUS)      "/Users/arthurmorris/Library/Application Support/Stata/ado/plus/"
[6]  (OLDPLACE)  "~/ado/"

1 & 2 are maintained by Stata itself so we will leave them alone. 3 “.” means that Stata looks in the current working directory, this would be more useful if Stata .do files knew where they were located while they were running… but they don’t, so I find that relying on this behavior often causes more hassle than it’s worth (in contrast to python where this works very well). 4 is the main event for our purposes, but before we dive in there I’ll just note that 5 is where ssc install and net install puts the files that they download, and 6 is a depreciated location used by previous versions of Stata.¹

Okay, back to 4.

Put any .ado files that you download manually (or write yourself) in “PERSONAL”

Stata makes referencing this location easy by including it as the c-class parameter c(sysdir_personal) (see help creturn), but–possibly unexpectedl–does not create this folder when you install it. To download and install psacalc2 do the following:

1. Go to github and download the file: https://github.com/ArthurHowardMorris/psacalc_supports_reghdfe
2. Check whether your c(sysdir_personal) exists. If the following works then exists :)

cd "`c(sysdir_personal)'"

1. If 2. throws and error, then create the folder:

mkdir "`c(sysdir_personal)'"

1. Place the files you downloaded in the folder you just created. A fast way to do this is just open a terminal and:

cd /Users/arthurmorris/Documents/Stata/ado/personal/
open .

to open a finder widow, then drag and drop from your downloads folder, but at this point you probably can navigate on your own.

1. Finally, confirm that your new command is where you think that it should be:

which psacalc2

should tell you that your file is now in your “PERSONAL” folder.

1. See help adopath for details on how to modify this list. ↩