Overview

This section provides instructions for installing git, GitHub, Python, and Docker, all of which are needed to use OpenSAFELY from your own computer. These tools are required for, or greatly simplify, the following tasks:

• defining the data you want to extract from the database
• importing codelists
• creating dummy data for developing analysis scripts
• testing analysis scripts locally
• running the analysis on the server

For the analysis proper, you can use Stata, R, or Python (almost) however you wish — see the pipelines section for guidance and exceptions.

Additionally, to use OpenSAFELY fully you will need some platform-specific permissions, for instance to be able to submit analyses to run on the server. We will issue these as required.