Preparing your system and getting the template - Templates for Reproducible Research Projects in Economics

Programme installation¶

Make sure you have the following programs installed and that these can be found on your path. This template requires

The package manager pixi (video on installation of and introduction to pixi)
A modern LaTeX distribution (e.g. TeXLive, MacTex, or MikTex)
Git.
The text editor VS Code, unless you know what you are doing.

Validating the installation paths¶

If you are on Windows, please open the Windows Powershell. On Mac or Linux, open a terminal. As everything will be started from the Powershell/Terminal, you need to make sure that all programmes you need in your project (for sure pixi, Git, and LaTeX; potentially VS Code, R, Julia, Stata) can be found on your PATH. That is, these need to be accessible from your shell. This often requires a bit of manual work, in particular on Windows.

To see which programmes can be found on your path, type (leave out the leading dollar sign, this is just standard notation for a command line prompt):
Windows
```
$ echo $env:path
```
Mac/Linux
```
$ echo $PATH
```
This gives you a list of directories that are available on your PATH.
Check that this list contains the path to the programs you want to use in your project, in particular, pixi (this contains the required Python distribution), a LaTeX distribution, the text editor VS Code, Git, and any other program that you need for your project (R, Julia, Stata). Otherwise, add them by looking up their paths on your computer and follow the steps described in the FAQ section (see the sections on “PATH environmental variable in Windows” and “Adding directories to the PATH: MacOS and Linux”).
If you added any directory to PATH, you need to close and reopen your shell, so that this change is implemented.
To be on the safe side regarding your paths, you can check directly whether you can launch the programmes. For Python, type:
```
$ pixi run python
>>> exit()
```
This starts python in your shell and exits from it again. The top line should indicate that you are using a Python distribution provided by conda-forge. Here is an example output obtained on Linux:
```
Python 3.14.0 | packaged by conda-forge | (main, Jan 10 2026, 12:00:00) [GCC 14.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
```
To start and exit pdflatex.
```
$ pdflatex
$ X
```
An editor window should open after typing:
```
$ code
```
If required, do the same for R, Julia, or Stata.

Navigating to the parent folder and validating Git¶

In the Powershell/Terminal, navigate to the parent folder of your future project.

Now type pwd, which prints the absolute path to your present working directory. There must not be any spaces or special characters in the path (for instance ä, ü, é, Chinese or Cyrillic characters).

If you have any spaces or special characters on your path, change to a folder that does not have these special characters (e.g., on Windows, create a directory C:\projects. Do not rename your home directory).

Type git status , this should yield the output:

fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

Installing the template¶

To install the template repository, first go to the econ-project-templates repo.

Now follow the official instructions on how to create a new repository from a template repository.