Stan.jl warning

General Usage
1

Hi everyone,

When I load Stan.jl, I receive the following message:
WARNING: using Stan.CMDSTAN_HOME in module Main conflicts with an existing identifier.

I had created a .juliarc.jl file containing the statement:
CMDSTAN_HOME = “C:\Users\USERNAME\CmdStan” (I’m using Windows 10)
as stated in the Stan.jl documentation for setting up CmdStan.

What does this warning mean and is there a way to fix it? Considering it’s a warning and not an error, do I need to be concerned with it at all?

2

Looking at the Stan.jl source code, I think this probably isn’t something you need to worry about. But I think you can make the error go away by setting an environment variable rather than creating a global Julia variable. That would mean changing your .juliarc.jl command to:

ENV["CMDSTAN_HOME"] = "C:\Users\USERNAME\CmdStan"

does that work? And does it get rid of the warning?

BTW, the relevant lines are here: https://github.com/goedman/Stan.jl/blob/ef6b07f43f575cad5b8d40e0953e013ab7def64c/src/Stan.jl#L12

3

Thanks for jumping in Robin!

Hi Eric,

We’ve gone through several iterations on how to set this up in such a way that it works across platforms. Clearly it still isn’t correct.

Before changing anything, let’s see if Robin’s suggestion works. If so, maybe I should just update the documentation.

Does Pkg.test(“Stan”) work ok for you?

Regards,
Rob

4

Thanks for the help!

Robin - your suggestion did remove the warning message, thanks.

Rob - I got errors when I ran Pkg.test(“Stan”). When that command is executed, is it running the same model as used in the walkthrough example provided in the documentation? I was trying to run that code in a Jupyter notebook and was receiving errors - I think the same as I had gotten with Pkg.test(“Stan”).

I can post the output files if that would help.

5

Hi Eric,

would it be possible to switch to https://github.com/goedman/Stan.jl/issues/47 https://github.com/goedman/Stan.jl/issues/47 ? I have copied the thread so far.

Yes, I definitely need to see the error messages and versions you are using (I assuming Julia 0.6 and Stan.jl 2.0.0).

The first step is to see if CmdStan works.

Regards,
Rob

6

Hi Rob,

I posted to GitHub as you requested.

Best,
Eric