Step 1: Main file

You may or may not have a main file. The following should be adapted to your circumstances. You do not need to create a file that is called main.do if you already have one, but you may need to update your existing main file.

Reference: https://larsvilhuber.github.io/self-checking-reproducibility/02-hands_off_running.html

Creating a single main file is straightforward. However, you will want to make some minor edits depending on where, in the above template setup, the file is located:

Scenario A: main is in the code directory

The most frequent scenario we see (which we call Scenario A) amongst economists is that the main file is in the code directory:

README.pdf
data/
...
code/
  main.do
  01_readcps.do
  02_readfred.do
...

In this case, the following generic main file will work, with scenario set to "A".

// Stata example
local scenario "A"          // Scenario A: main is in code directory
local pwd : pwd                     // This always captures the current directory

if "`scenario'" == "A" {             // If in Scenario A, we need to change directory first
    cd ..
}
global rootdir : pwd                // Now capture the directory to use as rootdir
display in red "Rootdir has been set to: $rootdir"
cd "`pwd'"                            // Return to where we were before and never again use cd

// Now run the rest of the code
do "$rootdir/code/01_readcps.do"
do "$rootdir/code/02_readfred.do"
do "$rootdir/code/03_table1-5.do"
do "$rootdir/code/04_figures1-4.do"

Scenario B: main is in the top-level directory

More common in other computational sciences, but also present amongst economists, is that the main file is in the top-level directory:

README.pdf
main.do
data/
...
code/
  01_readcps.do
  02_readfred.do
...

In this case, the following generic main file will work, with scenario set to "B"(though see Step 3 Dependencies)

// Stata example
local scenario "B"          // Scenario B: main is in project top-level directory
local pwd : pwd                     // This always captures the current directory

if "`scenario'" == "A" {             // If in Scenario A, we need to change directory first
    cd ..
}
global rootdir : pwd                // Now capture the directory to use as rootdir
display in red "Rootdir has been set to: $rootdir"
cd "`pwd'"                            // Return to where we were before and never again use cd

// Now run the rest of the code
do "$rootdir/code/01_readcps.do"
do "$rootdir/code/02_readfred.do"
do "$rootdir/code/03_table1-5.do"
do "$rootdir/code/04_figures1-4.do"

Important

In neither scenario did we hard-code the path to our project directory /my/computer/users/me/project. This is not an omission, and it is important, because it allows the code to be run on any computer, without modification.

Finally, you should not hard-code your rootdir. Set the project root directory dynamically:

// Stata:
global rootdir : pwd
// Example
datadir   = "$rootdir/data/raw"
outputdir = "$rootdir/data/clean"

# R:
# if using the here package:
rootdir <- here::here()
# or the rprojroot package
rootdir <- rprojroot::find_root_file("README.pdf")  # or other marker file
# Example
datadir   = file.path(rootdir, "data", "raw")
outputdir = file.path(rootdir, "data", "clean")

# Python:
import os
from pathlib import Path

# Set directories
code_dir = Path(__file__).resolve().parent
rootdir = code_dir.parent
# Example
datadir   = rootdir / "data" / "raw"
outputdir = rootdir / "data" / "clean"

IMPORTANT: your code MUST contain the line (Stata) global rootdir : pwd (or equivalent) to set the project root directory dynamically.

Creating directories programmatically

If your code uses directories that may start out empty, or may not exist on the replicators’ computers, you must create them programmatically.

// Stata:
cap mkdir "$outputdir"

# R:
dir.create(outputdir, showWarnings = FALSE, recursive = TRUE)

# Python:
outputdir.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)