Getting psiTurk installed on your computer
psiTurk can be installed on any modern computer which supports Python (<= 2.7). However, currently psiTurk is not supported on Windows (see below). It works well on most unix variants including Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux. Installation is usually not difficult.
When psiTurk is successfully installed, you will simply have a new command line tool available called psiturk. The psiturk command provides a number of functions to you including launching the Server and interacting with the Mechanical Turk and Amazon Web Services (AWS) systems.
Installation of psiTurk requires:
- A python installation (<= v2.7). We recommend the Enthough python distribution on Mac OS X.
-
The
pippackage manager. Directions on installing this are given below. - Access to a command line tool. (e.g., Terminal.app on Mac OS X)
- A web browser. A WebKit compatible browser such as FireFox, Safari, or Chrome is recommended.
To install the package there are two options currently. First, the current stable release of psiTurk is hosted on the python package index pypi. As a result, it can easily be installed as a standard python package using the python package manager tool pip. Alternatively, you can install directly from the development or master (i.e., stable) branch on github. The following instructions describe the general process. In addition, system specific notes are provided below.
The easiest way to install psiTurk is via pip. If you don't already have pip, you
can install it by typing the following in a terminal:
cd /tmp # Just to put us in a directory that will be cleaned up periodically
curl -O https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py
python get-pip.py # If you get a permissions error, try typing sudo python get-pip.py
Once pip is installed, type into a terminal:
pip install psiturk
If this doesn't work, try
sudo pip install psiturk
If the install was successful you will have a new command psiturk available on your command line. You can check the location of this command by typing
which psiturk
You can also install the latest version directly from github using pip. To install the latest stable branch follow the instructions above to install pip and:
sudo pip install git+git://github.com/NYUCCL/psiTurk.git@master
or
sudo pip install git+git://github.com/NYUCCL/psiTurk.git@dev
for the bleeding-edge development version. If the install was successful you will have a new command psiturk available on your command line. You can check the location of this command by typing
which psiturk
To avoid compatibility issues, if you upgrade from a previous version it can be useful to first uninstall then reinstall psiturk using the following sequence of commands:
$ pip uninstall psiturk
$ git clone git@github.com:NYUCCL/psiTurk.git
$ cd psiTurk
$ sudo python setup.py installTo use the development tree, the second command should be git clone -b dev git@github.com:NYUCCL/psiTurk.git.
Apple users will need to install a C compiler via XCode; to do so, install XCode from the App store. Once you have downloaded it, install the command line tools from the preferences menu as instructed here. For earlier versions of Mac OS X (e.g., Snow Leopard) you may need to install XCode using the installation disc that came with your computer. The command line tools are an option during the installation process for these systems.
psiTurk is relatively painless to install on most Linux systems since all four of the requirements listed above come installed by default in most distributions. If you have specific issues please update the documentation!
psiTurk is currently not supported on Windows. This is due to a technical limitation in the ability to run server processes on Windows. We currently recommend that Windows users try a cloud-based install such as openshift.
If your local computer does not support psiTurk is it still possible to use the package by using a free hosting solution such as openshift. Begin by creating an account at http://openshift.redhat.com/ and download the command line tools at https://www.openshift.com/developers/rhc-client-tools-install
Create a python-2.7 application and add a PostgreSQL cartridge to the app
rhc app create psiturk python-2.7 postgresql-8.4 --from-code git://github.com/jbmartin/psiturk-on-openshift.git
or you can do this to watch the build
rhc app create -a psiturk -t python-2.7
rhc cartridge add -a psiturk20 postgresql-8.4
Add this upstream psiturk repo
cd psiturk
git remote add upstream -m master https://github.com/jbmartin/psiturk-on-openshift.git
git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master
Then push the repo upstream
git push
That's it, you can now checkout your application at
http://psiturk-$YOURNAMESPACE.rhcloud.com
To access the your openshift hosted database run
rhc port forward -a psiturk
Connect to the database using your favorite SQL app, the PostgreSQL Local specs, and your credentials.