Installation

Installation of the Experiment Factory Software requires some familiarity with the command line, as the software is based in python. “Pip” is a package management system for python, and you can use pip to install our software, expfactory-python, which is the controller of all pieces of this infrastructure. If you want to install the development version, you can install directly from Github with this command:

pip install git+git://github.com/expfactory/expfactory-python.git

Or to install the current release, use this command:

pip install expfactory

Please note that expfactory was developed with python 2.7 and has not been tested on other versions. Installation will place an executable, expfactory in your bin folder. You should be able to type which expfactory and see the location of your application. If you cannot, you likely installed the application locally, and the executable was placed in a folder not on your path. You can either try installation with sudo, or look at the output of the installation to find the path that it was installed to:

Installing expfactory script to /usr/local/bin

You can also use the module as a standard python module, meaning importing functions into scripts, for example:

from expfactory.battery import generate

Quickstart

Running Experiments

Deploy a battery of experiments, a game, or a survey on your local machine

expfactory --run --experiments stroop,nback
expfactory --run --survey bis11_survey
expfactory --run --game bridge_game

Developing Experiments

To run (or preview) a folder (experiment) you are working on, you can cd into that folder, and use the –run command:

cd my_experiment
expfactory --run

You can also specify the folder as an argument:

expfactory --run --folder /home/vanessa/Desktop/my_experiment

Validate the configuration file (config.json) for your experiment

cd my_experiment
expfactory --validate

Test your experiment with our experiment robot

cd my_experiment
expfactory --test

Run the executable to open up a web interface to generate psiturk battery or virtual machine.

expfactory

You can also specify a port:

expfactory --port=8088