nbstata is a Jupyter kernel for Stata built on top of pystata.

For the User Guide, click here.

A Jupyter notebook allows you to combine interactive code and results with Markdown in a single document. Though it is named after the three core programming languages it supports (Julia, Python, and R), it can be used with with a wide variety of languages.

nbstata allows you to create Stata notebooks (as opposed to using Stata within a Python notebook, which is needlessly clunky if you are working primarily with Stata).

• Easy setup
• Works with Stata 17+ (only).
• DataGrid widget with browse-like capabilities (e.g., interactive filtering)
• Variable and data properties available in a ‘contextual help’ side panel
• Quarto inline code support

Users of Stata 17 or 18.0 also get these features only built-in natively to Stata 18.5+:

• Displays Stata output without the redundant ‘echo’ of (multi-line) commands
• Autocompletion for variables, macros, matrices, and file paths
• Interactive/richtext help files accessible within notebook
• #delimit ; interactive support (along with all types of comments)

The video below demonstrates using Stata in a Jupyter notebook. In addition to the NBClassic application shown there, nbstata can also be used with JupyterLab, VS Code, or Quarto.

…that you can’t do with the official Stata interface?

• Exploratory analysis that is both:
  • interactive
  • preserved for future reference/editing
• Present results in a way that interweaves:¹
  • code
  • results (including graphs)
  • rich text:
    1. lists
    2. Headings
    3. 
    4. links
    5. math: $y_{it}=\beta_0+\varepsilon_{it}$

nbstata is being developed using nbdev. The /nbs directory is where edits to the source code should be made. (The python code is then exported to the /nbdev library folder.)

For more, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Kyle Barron authored the original stata_kernel, which works for older versions of Stata. Vinci Chow created a Stata kernel that instead uses pystata, which first became available with Stata 17. nbstata was originally derived from his pystata-kernel, but much of the docs and newer features are derived from stata_kernel.