Docker image basic Stata image with Julia

Purpose

This Docker image is meant to isolate and stabilize that environment, and should be portable across multiple operating system, as long as Docker is available.

To learn more about the use of containers for research reproducibility, see Carpentries' docker-introduction. For commercial services running containers, see codeocean.com, gigantum, or any of the cloud service providers. For an academic project using containers, see Whole Tale.

NOTE: The image created by these instructions contains binary code that is © Stata. Permission was granted by Stata to Lars Vilhuber to post these images, without the license. A valid license is necessary to build and use these images.

Requirements

You need a Stata license to run the image. If rebuilding, may need Stata license to build the image.

The currently used image requires a StataNow license. You may need to rebuild it if you only have a Stata 18 or other permanent license.

Where should you put the Stata license

In the documentation below, we will use a (bash) environment variable to abstract from the actual location of the Stata license. This has been tested on MacOS and Linux, and it should work using Git Bash on Windows. Comments welcome.

Dockerfile

The Dockerfile contains the build instructions. See https://github.com/AEADataEditor/docker-stata for more information on the base image used here.

Edit .myconfig.sh before building the image. Then use

./build.sh

to build the image. This will copy in the Stata components, and then install the Julia components based on the provided Manifest.toml. Subsequent requests to run the image should use those components without further installation, but this has not always worked, feedback is requested.

Using the image

For all the subsequent docker run commands, we will use similar environment variables:

VERSION=18
TAG=latest
MYHUBID=aeadataeditor
MYIMG=aer-2022-0276

and either

STATALIC="$(pwd)/stata.lic.${VERSION}"

or

STATALIC="$(find $HOME/Dropbox/ -name stata.lic.$VERSION | tail -1)"

where again, the various forms of STATALIC are meant to capture the location of the stata.lic file (in my case, it is called stata.lic.18, but in your case, it might be simply stata.lic).

Convenience script

Assuming these scripts are in the root directory of the replication package, the following will work provide a shell inside the container:

./run_docker.sh

docker run \
   -v "${STATALIC}":/usr/local/stata/stata.lic \
   -v $WORKSPACE:/project \
   -w /project \
   --rm \
   -it \
   --user statauser \
   --entrypoint /bin/bash \
   $dockerrepo

The script will

• map the Stata license into the right location within the image
• map the current directory into the image at /project and sets the working directory to that "volume"
• ensure the user is set to statauser inside the image
• modify the entrypoint to the Bash shell, and provide an interactive shell

The script is known to work on MacOS and Linux (including WSL). You may need to make adjustments on Windows, or on systems where docker is not the user-accessible Docker command.