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command_line_overview.rst

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Command-line Interface Overview

The psiTurk shell is a command line interface which allows users to communicate with their experiment server, and also with Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The psiturk command has several invocations.

Options

psiturk [options]

  • -v, --version

    Print the currently installed version of psiTurk and exit.

  • -s, --script <filename>

    Run a list of commands from a text file, then exit. Each line in the file is treated as a command.

Command invocation

psiturk command [argument]...

Any single shell command can be run without launching the interactive shell, by invoking psiturk with the command as an argument. For example, to launch the psiturk server:

$ psiturk server on

Launch an interactive shell

psiturk

Alternatively, an interactive shell can be launched by running the command psiturk in any psiturk experiment server. A config.txt file will be loaded from the directory in which the shell is launched.

Warning

The interactive shell cannot be launched without valid AWS credentials having been set! This is because the prompt is intrinsically tied to AMT -- its prompt displays the current mturk "mode" and the "number of hits".

However, non-AWS psiturk commands can still be run via the psiturk <command> interface.

The psiTurk shell prompt looks something like this:

[psiTurk server:off mode:sdbx #HITs:0]$

and contains several pieces of useful information:

  • Server field -- will generally be set to on or off and denotes whether the experiment server is running. If the server field says unknown, this likely means that a server process is running from an improperly closed previous psiTurk shell session. In this case, you may need to manually kill the processes in the terminal or restart your terminal session.
  • Mode field -- displays the current mode of the shell. In the full psiturk shell, the mode will be either sdbx (sandbox) or live. While in cabin mode, the mode will be listed as cabin. More about the psiturk shell mode can be found here.
  • #HITs field -- displays the number of HITs currently active, either in the worker sandbox when in sandbox mode or on the live AMT site when in live mode.

Create an Example Project

To create a sample project, run the following:

psiturk-setup-example