expfactory 3.14

software to generate a reproducible container battery of experiments.

# The Experiment Factory

[](https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00521) [](https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/108672186) [](https://gitter.im/expfactory/lobby)


See our [documentation](https://expfactory.github.io/expfactory) for getting started. If you are new to containers, read our [background](https://expfactory.github.io/expfactory/generate#background) or [paper](paper) first. If you want a more guided entry, see the [detailed start](https://expfactory.github.io/expfactory/generate#detailed-start)

The Experiment Factory is software to create a reproducible container that you can easily customize to deploy a set of web-based experiments.

## Citation If the Experiment Factory is useful to you, please cite [the paper](https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00521) to support the software and open source development.

` Sochat, (2018). The Experiment Factory: Reproducible Experiment Containers. Journal of Open Source Software, 3(22), 521, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00521 `

## Contributing We have many ways to contribute, and will briefly provide resources here to get you started.

### How to Contribute If you are a developer interested in working on the Experiment Factory software you should read out [contributing guidelines](.github/CONTRIBUTING.md) for details. For contributing containers and experiments, see our [user documentation](https://expfactory.github.io/expfactory/contribute). If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to [ask a question](https://www.github.com/expfactory/expfactory/issues).

### Code of Conduct It’s important to treat one another with respect, and maintain a fun and respectful environment for the open source community. Toward this aim, we ask that you review our [code of conduct](.github/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md)

## Background 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 can be easily shared.

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

If you build on [Docker Hub](https://hub.docker.com/) 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.