ProtoTurk

A simple server and script for rapidly prototyping Mechanical Turk interfaces.

prototurk server

The ProtoTurk package provides prototurk, a Bottle-based webserver for rapidly prototyping Mechanical Turk interfaces. prototurk takes Mechanical-Turk compatible HTML templates and CSV files as arguments:

prototurk [--host hostname] [--port port_number] html_file csv_file

and starts a webserver that, by default, listens on localhost port 8080. prototurk re-reads the HTML template and CSV file from disk with every page refresh. When a user submits the HTML template's form, the form parameters are logged to stdout.

prototurk does not save any data to database or disk. If you need to run a Mechanical Turk-style server in your Local Environment, please take a look at Turkle.

prototurk-populate script

The ProtoTurk package also includes prototurk-populate, a simple script that takes as arguments the path to a Mechanical-Turk compatible HTML template, the path to a CSV file, and the (1-indexed) row number for the data to use from the CSV file:

prototurk-populate [--output-file OUTPUT_FILE] html_file csv_file csv_row_number

The script outputs a populated HTML template, where the template variables have been replaced with values from the row of the CSV file. By default, prototurk-populate writes the populated HTML template to stdout, but the --output-file flag can alternately be used to write the populated output directly to a (UTF-8 encoded) file.

prototurk-populate makes it easier to validate Mechanical Turk template files using HTML and JavaScript validation tools. Most popular HTML/JavaScript will generate errors about Mechanical Turk-style template variables. prototurk-populate makes it easier to validate populated templates with real data, particularly as part of Continuous Integration workflows.

Installation

ProtoTurk can be installed using:

python setup.py install

Or from PyPI:

pip install prototurk