expfactory 3.0

software to generate a reproducible container battery of experiments.

# The Experiment Factory

[](https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/108672186)


[documentation](https://expfactory.github.io/expfactory)

The Experiment Factory is software to create a reproducible container that you can easily customize to deploy a set of web-based experiments. It’s predecessor at [Expfactory.org](https://expfactory.org) was never able to open up to the public, and this went against the original goal of the software. Further, the badly needed functionality to serve a local battery was poorly met with [expfactory-python](https://www.github.com/expfactory/expfactory-python) as time progressed and dependencies changes.

This version is agnostic to the underlying driver of the experiments, and provides reproducible, instantly deployable “container” experiments. What does that mean?

• You obtain (or build) one container, a battery of experiments.

• You (optionally) customize it - custom variables (e.g., a study identifier) and configurations go into the build recipe - you can choose to use your own database (default output is flat files) - other options are available at runtime

• The container is a Singularity container, meaning that it’s a file that can be easily moved, and shared.

• You run the container, optionally specifying a subset and ordering, and collect your results

If you build on [Singularity Hub](https://www.singularity-hub.org) anyone else can then pull and use your exact container to collect their own results. It is exact down to the file hash.

## Experiment Library The experiments themselves are now maintained under [expfactory-experiments](https://www.github.com/expfactory-experiments), official submissions to be found by expfactory can be added to the [library](https://www.github.com/expfactory/library) (under development) to be tested that they meet minimum requirements.

The documentation and codebase are under development! For now, you can preview legacy [experiments](http://expfactory.github.io/table.html) that will be ported to this updated version, and preview our [documentation base](https://expfactory.github.io/expfactory) provided with this repository. This code base is under development, so it might even be the case that not all files are added yet! Stay tuned.