Tagging

A general-purpose web-based psychophysics experiment platform

Installation

Tagging is a little heavy to install, and we don't yet provide binaries. First-time installation may take a while, and running a Tagging server requires some experience with system administration. The instructions on this page should be enough to build and start a server - links are for background reading.

Prerequisites:

• PostgreSQL database Create a database for Tagging. You will specify the database user, name and password later in a Tagging config file.

  (osx hint: with homebrew )

  (ubuntu hint: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib)

• git

Building from source

We use git submodules, the nix package manager, and reflex-platform to manage dependencies and building. These are all bundled with the Tagging code. Run the following in any directory where you keep source code.

git clone https://github.com/CBMM/tagging
cd tagging
git submodule update --init --recursive

If this is your first time installing, use reflex-platform to install nix:

./deps/reflex-platform/installNix.sh

To build the server and frontends:

./build.sh

build.sh will try to compile both the server and the frontend web experiments against a common definition of the Tagging API. You may want to comment out any lines in that script for frontends that you're not interested in, or that fail to build for whatever reason. A typical Tagging site only requires tagging-server, tagging-client and a single other frontend of your choice, to work.

build.sh copies the server binary and frontend javascript to the app directory. Frontend Haskell code will have been converted to javascript and saved in app/static/media/js

Running the server

Copy app/devel.cfg.example to app/devel.cfg and set the user, database and pasasword fields according to your Postgres setup. Do not keep devel.cfg under version control!

Then we create empty files to log activity to and launch the server on port 8000.

cd path/to/tagging/app
mkdir log
touch log/access.log
touch log/error.log
sudo ./tagging-server -p 8000

If all is working, go to http://localhost:8000 and you will see the login screen.

By default, the first account created will have admin privileges (the ability to create users, modify any database rows and set and revoke researcher/admin creds on other users). We run the server locally (on port 8000) first in order to set up the admin account before anyone on the public internet can create an account.

To run the server on the public internet, the easiest way is to configure your machine to allow incoming traffic on port 80, and then run sudo tagging-server -p 80.