Heroku deployments

Traditionally PsyNet and Dallinger experiments were deployed on Heroku. Heroku provides a useful automated server provisioning service which means you don’t have to worry about purchasing and setting up your own server. However, it is an expensive solution and one that many PsyNet users are currently moving away from.

When deploying an experiment with Heroku you will see a Heroku tab in your experiment dashboard that provides links to useful resources for monitoring your experiment. For example, you can see information on the distribution of response times for your app’s users:

See Metrics for more details.

Sometimes when debugging an Heroku experiment it is useful to execute code on the remote server. You can do this using the Heroku Exec command.

Beware that leaving Heroku experiments running for a long time can rack up big bills. Make sure that you always tear down your Heroku web servers (psynet destroy heroku) when you’re done (but don’t forget to export your data first). You can also tear down web servers via the Heroku interface.