Developing, maintaining, and hosting Stata statistical software on GitHub

Abstract

The popularity of GitHub is growing, among not only software developers but also statisticians and data scientists. In this article, I discuss why social coding platforms such as GitHub are preferable for developing, documenting, maintaining, and collaborating on statistical software. Furthermore, I introduce the github command version 2.0 for Stata, which facilitates building, searching, installing, and managing statistical packages hosted on GitHub. I also provide a command for searching filenames in all Stata packages published on the Statistical Software Components Archive and GitHub to ensure unique filenames and package names, which is a common concern among Stata programmers. I make further suggestions to enhance the practice of developing and hosting statistical packages on GitHub as well as using them for data analysis.