Stata License

[julianmatthewman]

Hello,

I would like to know how to add my Stata license to run code with the stata-mp runner from the project.yaml on my machine. It isn't described in the documentation yet (https://docs.opensafely.org/actions-scripts/).

Many thanks in advance!

[bloodearnest]

Hi Julian

This isn't very well documented at the moment, but you can set an environment variable in your terminal, and then opensafely run  should then work fine with stata actions:

export STATA_LICENSE="your license"

However, there may be problems if your version of stata is not stata-mp, as that's the version OpenSAFELY uses, and I think the license has to match the same version. It's all a bit awkward! If so, let me know, and we'll need to figure out a way to solve the issue.

Thanks

[sebbacon]

@julianmatthewman, could you confirm, was it an MP license, or for a different version? Thanks!

[sebbacon]

(for context: I'm updating the documentation. It'd also be handy to know how you located the license number in the correct format on your machine)

[remlapmot]

The easiest way to find a Stata license number is just to open Stata - as it's in the output first printed to screen (Serial number line below)

  ___  ____  ____  ____  ____ ®
 /__    /   ____/   /   ____/      17.0
___/   /   /___/   /   /___/       MP—Parallel Edition

 Statistics and Data Science       Copyright 1985-2021 StataCorp LLC
                                   StataCorp
                                   4905 Lakeway Drive
                                   College Station, Texas 77845 USA
                                   800-STATA-PC        https://www.stata.com
                                   979-696-4600        [email protected]

Stata license: Unlimited-user 2-core network, expiring 21 Jan 2023
Serial number: 501709302483

For the rest of the info (Authorization and Code) as explained above - if you don't have the original documents all the info can be found in a text file, called STATA.LIC (on Windows) or stata.lic (macOS and Linux) which is usually at the top level of the folder of your Stata installation:

• On my Windows machine it's in C:\Program Files\Stata17
• On Linux it's again in the top level of my stata17 folder which I put at the location Stata Corp. suggest /usr/local/stata17/
• On macOS it's in /Applications/Stata/

In the stata.lic file the different fields are separated by ! characters. The license number is the first set of digits upto the first !.

[bloodearnest]

For the record, the STATA_LICENSE environment variable is passed through wholesale, so it needs to be the entire contents of your stata.lic file, not just the license serial number (which is not enough on its own for stata to accept).

[julianmatthewman]

@julianmatthewman, could you confirm, was it an MP license, or for a different version? Thanks!

If I remember correctly, yes, it was an MP license.

[sebbacon]

Thanks all, I've updated the docs here