Specifying dependencies

The Python packages required by a given PsyNet experiment should be specified in requirements.txt. If you are just using PsyNet, then you would normally just have PsyNet in requirements.txt. However, if you want to use additional packages (e.g. librosa) then you should add them underneath.

PsyNet as a dependency

Because PsyNet is currently released via GitLab, its requirements string looks somewhat different to other Python packages. It looks like this:

psynet@git+https://gitlab.com/PsyNetDev/PsyNet#egg=psynet

It is usually a good idea to specify a particular version of PsyNet here so that your experiment doesn’t break when later versions of PsyNet are released. You can do this by adding @<tag> after the repository link, for example:

psynet@git+https://gitlab.com/PsyNetDev/PsyNet@v10.0.0#egg=psynet

to specify PsyNet 10.0.0. You can also use a Git commit hash instead of a tag if you want to link to a particular commit, or indeed a particular Git branch name.

Depending on your mode of deployment, you may be asked to generate a constraints.txt file before deploying. This specifies the precise versions of all packages that would be installed as dependencies for your experiment. You can create this file by running psynet generate-constraints when prompted.

Custom package dependencies

When using a custom package in a Dallinger/PsyNet experiment, you also need to include it in your experiment’s requirements.txt. You can use a package by including the following in your requirements:

<package_name>@git+<link_to_repository>@<commit_hash_or_branch_name>#egg=<package_name>

For example,

<package_name>@git+https://gitlab.com/computational-audition-lab/theory-rep-samp/vowels@v1.5.1#egg=vowel_extract

If the repository is a private repository, you will need to generate a custom deploy token. Follow the process described in Deploy tokens and based on the above example replace username and deploy_token in the line below accordingly.

<package_name>@git+https://<username>:<deploy_token>@gitlab.com/computational-audition-lab/theory-rep-samp/vowels@v1.5.1#egg=vowel_extract

Other dependencies

It is also possible to to specify software dependencies that are not Python packages but are instead command-line utilities, for example sox or ffmpeg. This is is easily done if you use the Docker mode for deployment, as is the default for SSH deployment to custom servers.

This is achieved by adding a custom text file to your experiment directory entitled prepare_docker_image.sh. This should be a shell script that installs any additional software that you need onto your Docker image. You can assume that this command will be run on a Linux image. For an example, see the Consonance and the carillon experiment, which includes a custom prepare_docker_image.sh script for installing the libsndfile1 utility.