Stata tip 147: Porting downloaded packages between machines

Stata users are often asked to work on web-disabled machines with little or no Internet access. So it may not be possible for the user to download packages at will using the net or ssc command. This requirement may exist for good reasons, such as prevention of cybercrime and data breaches.

Stata, like R and Genstat, is a statistical language with potentially as many dialects as users. These dialects are defined by the optional packages that each user has downloaded; the number may be hundreds for a high-power user. This is a major advantage of a statistical language (such as Stata) over a statistical package (such as SPSS). And Stata users would like to continue to have that advantage on web-disabled machines.

Fortunately, downloaded packages can be ported between machines. Downloaded packages on a web-enabled machine are stored in a folder called PLUS, which is one of a list of folders called the ado-path and which Stata searches when asked to run an ado-file. To list the ado-path, including the PLUS folder, we should use the adopath command (see [P] sysdir). If we use the author’s Stata 17 under Windows 10, we get the following output:

We see that the PLUS folder is

• "C:\Users\Roger Newson\ado\plus/"

which is a folder containing subfolders that contain the files belonging to the downloaded packages. In our case, there are over 100 packages containing over 1,000 files.

Most ways of porting a PLUS folder start by zipping it into a .zip folder to save space. The official Stata way to do this is by using the zipfile command (see [D] zipfile):

• . zipfile "C:\Users\Roger Newson\ado\plus/", saving(myplus.zip, replace)

This command produces a lot of output to the log, which I have omitted. However, it also produces the .zip folder myplus.zip, which contains the folder Users, which contains the folder Roger Newson, which contains the folder ado, which contains the folder plus, which contains the subfolders and other contents of our original PLUS folder.

A .zip folder may be ported using a high-security file transfer utility, or it may be simply copied to a USB drive that is itself ported to the destination machine. Either way, the user copies the contents of the ported PLUS folder to a location on the destination machine. In our case, our destination machine also uses Windows, and this location will be

• S:\CPG\Studies\cpgplus\

To be able to use the packages on our destination machine, we simply add the location (and its subfolders) to our ado-path, using an adopath + command:

Once this is done, we can use any packages in the ported folder (or its subfolders). Note that the ported folder is ported as a single item, so this process takes no more time for 100 packages containing 1,000 files than for 1 package containing 2 files. Therefore, no powers are lost, even for high-power users with hundreds of downloaded packages.

Methods similar to these might also save time porting all of a user’s downloaded packages together from one machine to another, even if the destination machine is not web disabled or if the downloaded packages on the source machine live in a folder other than the PLUS folder.