here

here is a Stata package roughly replicating the behavior of the R library with the same name.

Installation

Install with net install:

net install here, from("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/korenmiklos/here/master/")

Usage

Type the command here anywhere inside a project folder and it will put the root of the project folder into a global macro called here.

. pwd
/Users/koren/projects/social-distancing/analysis/counterfactual

. here
/Users/koren/projects/social-distancing

. display "${here}"
/Users/koren/projects/social-distancing

. import delimited "${here}/data/raw/bls/employment.csv"

To fix the root folder, use here, set.

. cd "/Users/koren/projects/social-distancing/analysis"
/Users/koren/projects/social-distancing/analysis

. here, set
/Users/koren/projects/social-distancing/analysis

. display ${here}
/Users/koren/projects/social-distancing/analysis

Under the hood

With the basic usage, here looks for a parent folder with the (empty) file .here in it. Suppose you have the following folder structure.

.
├── .here
├── analysis
│   ├── counterfactual
│   │   └── simulate.do
│   └── regress.do
└── data
    └── raw
        └── employment.csv

Whether you call here from analysis/regress.do or from analysis/counterfactual/simulate.do, the value of ${here} will be absolute path of the folder containing the file .here. Whevener you issue

here, set

here will put a file called .here in your current folder.

here will also stop if it finds a .git folder, with the understanding that git repositories are typically in the root of a project folder. But if this is not case for your project, you can turn off this behavior with the otion

here, nogit