Sixpack 0.1.1

Requirements

• Redis

• Python >= 2.7 (3.0 Untested, Pull Requests welcome)

Getting Started

To get going create (or don’t, but you really should) a new virtualenv for your sixpack installation. Follow that up with a pip install:

$ pip install sixpack

Next you’re going to need to create a Sixpack configuration file that specificies a few things. Here’s the default:

redis_port: 6379                        # Redis port
redis_host: localhost                   # Redis host
redis_prefix: sixpack                   # all Redis keys will be prefixed with this
redis_db: 15                            # DB number in redis

full_response: True                     # Not In Use
disable_whiplash: True                  # Disable the whiplash/multi-armed bandit choice Algorithm

# The regex to match for robots
robot_regex: $^|trivial|facebook|MetaURI|butterfly|google|amazon|goldfire|sleuth|xenu|msnbot|SiteUptime|Slurp|WordPress|ZIBB|ZyBorg|pingdom|bot|yahoo|slurp|java|fetch|spider|url|crawl|oneriot|abby|commentreader|twiceler
ignored_ip_addresses: []                # List of IP
control_on_db_failure: True             # Not in use
allow_multiple_experiments: False       # Not in Use

secret_key: '<your secret key here>'    # Random key (any string is valid, required for sixpack-web to run)

You can store this file anywhere, we’d like to reccommend /etc/sixpack/config.yml, but where ever you’d like to store it is fine. As long as Redis is running, you should now be able to start the Sixpack servers like this:

$ SIXPACK_CONFIG=<path to config.yml> sixpack

and:

$ SIXPACK_CONFIG=<path to config.yml> sixpack-web

Sixpack Server and Sixpack Web will be listing on ports 5000 and 5001 respectively. For use in a production enviroment, please see the “Production Notes” section below.

We’ve also thrown in a small script that will help seed Sixpack with loads of random data, for testing and development on sixpack-web. You can seed Sixpack with the following command:

$ SIXPACK_CONFIG=<path to config.yml> sixpack-seed

This command will make a few dozen requests to the participate and convert endpoints. Feel free to run it multiple times to get a reasonable data set.

Usage

All interaction with Sixpack is done via HTTP GET requests. Sixpack allows for cross-language testing by accepting a unique client_id (which the client is responsible for generating) that links a participation to a conversion. All requests to Sixpack require a client_id.

$ curl http://localhost:5000/participate?experiment=button_color&alternatives=red&alternatives=blue&alternatives=orange&client_id=12345678-1234-5678-1234-567812345678

$ curl http://localhost:5000/participate?experiment=button_color&alternatives=red&alternatives=blue&force=red&client_id=12345678-1234-5678-1234-567812345678

{
    status: "ok",
    alternative: {
        name: "red"
    },
    experiment: {
        version: 0,
        name: "button_color"
    },
    client_id: "12345678-1234-5678-1234-567812345678"
}

$ curl http://localhost:5000/convert?experiment=button_color&client_id=12345678-1234-5678-1234-567812345678

Clients

We’ve already provied clients in four languages. We’d love to have clients in many more languages, so if you feel so inclined, first read the CLIENTSPEC (in the base of this resp). Write your client, then update and pull request this file so we know about it.

• Ruby

• Python

• JavaScript

• PHP

Production Notes

We reccomend running Sixpack on gunicorn in production. You will need to install gunicorn in your virtual environment before running the following.

To run the sixpack server using gunicorn/gevent - a separate installation - you can run the following:

gunicorn --access-logfile - -w 8 --worker-class=gevent sixpack.server:start

To run the sixpack web dashboard using gunicorn/gevent - a separate installation - you can run the following:

gunicorn --access-logfile - -w 2 --worker-class=gevent sixpack.web:start

Contributing

1. Fork it

2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)

3. Write Tests !!!

4. Commit your changes (git commit -am ‘Added some feature’)

5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)

6. Create new Pull Request

7. Please avoid changing versions numbers, as we’ll take care of that for you