Get PsychoJS Code running on-premise

Win Howto

The easist way to get the bash script running on Windows is the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL).

(1) Install WSL

• (a) Login with your Administrator account in Windows
• (b) Open the Program "Powershell"
• (c) Type the command wsl --install and follow the instruction.

After restarting, proceed.

(2) What was installed

• Search for Program "WSL". It has a cute pinguin icon. It starts an Ubuntu Terminal window (we need that later)
• Open your File Explorer (Win+E). On the bottom left there is net drive Linux/Ubuntu/.... Go to home/<yourname>.

(3) Download the template repo:

• Go back to the Terminal Window and type: git clone https://github.com/ulf1/pav-clone.git
• Type the command cd pav-clone. This how navigate into another folder on the terminal.
• Type the command ls -l. This will give a list of files and folders in this directory.
• In your File Explorer you should see a folder Linux/Ubuntu/home/<yourname>/pav-clone

Proceed with step (2) in the next chapter.

*nix HowTo (bash)

(1) Clone this Git-Rep

git clone https://github.com/ulf1/pav-clone.git
cd pav-clone

(2) Save your HTML-/JS-Code

• In PsychoPy, click on "Export HTML" in the Menu.
• Save the code as folder in this Git-Rep (In our example, the "mini-beispiel" folder)
• What is your experiment name? (In our example, "Test123")

You can recognize the experiment name by the file names. The experiment name is used as prefix, e.g.

• [experiment name]_lastrun.py
• [experiment name]-legacy-browsers.js
• [experiment name].js
• [experiment name].psyexp

(3) Call the script to alter the code

# bash script.sh  <folder>  <experiment name>
bash script-nix.sh  "mini-beispiel"  "Test123"

The script does the following:

• add a PsychoJS library as myfolder/lib/, and replace the versions numbers. Currently PsychoJS 2023.1.0 is availble. If you want to upgrade, then add a new library as psychojs/lib-YYYY.x.z, and set AVAILVERSION=YYYY.x.z in script-nix.sh
• add the PHP server script save_trial.php to your folder. The server script runs on your web server and receives the result file from your test subjects client/webbrowser.
• append the code of sendtoserver.js in your [experiment name].js file, and add the sendToServer() call in the first line of the JS function quitPsychoJS

(4) Check if works

You need to have PHP-CLI installed for this (e.g. sudo apt install php8.1-cli)

cd mini-beispiel
php -S localhost:8000

Open http://localhost:8000/ in your Browser.

In Chrome or Firefox, open the "Developer Tools" and check the Console tab to see if there is an Javascript error on client side. On your Ubuntu-PC, you will see the error logs of the PHP web server.

(5) Upload to study server

First, you need to create a folder on the study server

ssh webfb11@allgpsych-studien.uni-bremen.de 
cd /home/webfb11/public_html.allgpsych-studien.uni-bremen.de
mkdir test123
exit # logout or use another terminal window

Second, upload your code to the new study folder

cd mini-beispiel
scp -r $(pwd)/* webfb11@allgpsych-studien.uni-bremen.de:/home/webfb11/public_html.allgpsych-studien.uni-bremen.de/test123/

Run a trial https://allgpsych-studien.uni-bremen.de/test123/

Check if the trial data was saved

ssh webfb11@allgpsych-studien.uni-bremen.de 
ls /home/webfb11/public_html.allgpsych-studien.uni-bremen.de/test123/data

Acknowledgement

https://codewithsusan.com/notes/psychopy-self-hosted-experiments