FAQ#

PATH environmental variable in Windows#

In Windows, one has to oftentimes add the programs manually to the PATH environmental variable in the Advanced System Settings. See here for a detailed explanation of how to do that.

Adding directories to the PATH: MacOS and Linux#

Open the program Terminal. First, you will need to determine the shell you are using:

echo $SHELL

The output will be something like /bin/bash or /bin/zsh. Depending on the output, the below applies either to the file .bashrc or .zshrc. Both of them live in your home directory and are read every time you open a new terminal.

I will now provide a step-by-step guide of how to create / adjust the file .zshrc using the editor VS Code, which you can typically start from a shell by typing code. If you are familiar with editing text files, just use your editor of choice. If you are using a bash shell, replace .zshrc with .bashrc in the following.

  1. Open a Terminal and type

    code ~/.zshrc

    If .zshrc already existed, you will see some text at this point. If so, use the arrow keys to scroll all the way to the bottom of the file.

  2. Add the following line at the end of the file

    export PATH="${PATH}:/path/to/program/inside/package"

    You will need to follow the same steps as before. Example for Stata:

    # Stata directory
export PATH="${PATH}:/Applications/Stata/StataMP.app/Contents/MacOS/"

    In /Applications/Stata/StataMP.app, you may need to replace bits and pieces as appropriate for your installation (e.g. you might not have StataMP but StataSE).

    Similarly for Matlab or the likes.

  3. Press Return and then ctrl+o (= WriteOut = save) and Return once more.

Stata failure: FileNotFoundError#

The following failure:

FileNotFoundError: No such file or directory: '/Users/xxx/econ/econ project templates/bld/add_variables.log'

has a simple solution: Get rid of all spaces in the path to the project. (i.e., econ-project-templates instead of econ project templates in this case). To do so, do not rename your user directory, that will cause havoc. Rather move the project folder to a different location.

I have not been able to get Stata working with spaces in the path in batch mode, so this has nothing to do with Python or pytask. If anybody finds a solution, please let me know.

Stata failure: missing file#

If you see an error like this one:

-> missing file: '/Users/xxx/econ/econ-project/templates/bld/add_variables.log'

check that you have a license for the Stata version that is found (the Stata tool just checks availability top-down, i.e., MP-SE-IC, in case an MP-Version is found and you just have a license for SE, Stata will silently refuse to start up).

The solution is to remove all versions of Stata from its executable directory (e.g., /usr/local/stata) that cost more than your license did.