Deploying from archive

Sometimes it’s useful to redeploy a PsyNet experiment on the basis of previously exported data. Perhaps you had to shut down the experiment server due to some problem which you’ve now fixed. It’s easy to do this with PsyNet. First, look for a database.zip file in your export data folder. Copy the path to this file. Then run the same deploy command as you normally would, but pass the path to this file using the --archive option:

psynet deploy ssh --app my-experiment --archive database.zip

Note

Prepend docker/ to these commands if you are running PsyNet within Docker. In this case you will need to put your database.zip file inside your experiment directory so that Docker can see it properly.

When you deploy an experiment in this way, PsyNet will use the latest version of the code that you have in your current experiment directory. This means that you can use this opportunity to address small bugs in your code. Note that the database structure is, however, sensitive to what PsyNet version you use. It’s a bad idea however to upgrade PsyNet versions in between exporting and deploying from archive, unless you’re sure what you’re doing. Note also that the experiment deployment will reuse any assets you uploaded previously; it’s currently not supported to change your asset generation code and redeploy to obtain new assets.

It’s also possible to debug an experiment using a previously exported archive using analogous logic. For example, the following command runs a local debug experiment based on database.zip:

psynet debug local --archive database.zip