Required Experimental Files

Dallinger is flexible with regards to the form the front end takes. However, there are a number of required or forbidden files. You can verify that a directory is compatible by running the verify command from a terminal within the directory. Though just because these checks pass doesn’t mean the experiment will run! The minimal required structure is as follows:

Blue items are (optional) directories (note that the experiment directory can have any name), green items are required files (the README file can be either a txt file or a md file), and red items are forbidden files that will cause a conflict at run time.

Required files

  • config.txt - The config file contains a variety of parameters that affect how Dallinger runs. For more info see…
  • experiment.py - This is a python file containing the custom experiment code.
  • README.txt/md - This (hopefully) contains a helpful description of the experiment.

Forbidden files

A number of files cannot be included in the experiment directory. This is because, when Dallinger runs, it inserts a number of required files into the experiment directory and will overwrite any files with the same name. The files are as follows:

  • complete.html - this html page shows when dallinger is run in debug mode and the experiment is complete.
  • error_dallinger.html - this is a flexible error page that shows when something goes wrong.
  • launch.html - this page is shown when the /launch route is pinged and the experiment starts successfully.
  • waiting.html - this page shows a standard waiting room for experiments that require multiple users at once.
  • robots.txt - this file is returned to bots (e.g. from Google) that bump into the experiment when crawling the internet.
  • dallinger2.js - this is a javascript library with a number of helpful functions.
  • reqwest.min.js - this is required for dallinger2.js to work.
  • dallinger.css - this contains several css classes that are used in the demos.