reprozip 0.1.0-beta (beta)

Reproducibility tool for packing and unpacking experiments.

Packing

Suppose your experiment is executed by the following command line:

./experiment input_file.txt -i 150 -o output_file.txt

First, issue the following command:

reprozip --pack -e -c "./experiment input_file.txt -i 150 -o output_file.txt"

This will allow ReproZip to transparently gather all the necessary information. Argument -e means that the experiment should be executed prior to the creation of the package -- in case you have already executed it before with ReproZip, ReproZip may gather information stored in MongoDB rather than executing the experiment again.

This step will create a configuration file, named rep.config, in your working directory. Use it to exclude files that you do not want to be packed. You may also use Unix wildcards to exclude them (at the end of the configuration file, under [exclude]).

Next, use the following command (in the same working directory) to finally pack the experiment:

reprozip --pack -g --name my_experiment

This command will create a package (my_experiment.tar.gz) in your working directory.

For more information about available ReproZip arguments, please use:

reprozip --help

Unpacking

Unpacking is quite simple. Just use:

reprozip --exp my_experiment.tar.gz

This will unpack the experiment in a directory named my_experiment in the current working directory. To extract the experiment in another directory, just use the argument --wdir with the desired path.

Reproducing the Experiment

To reproduce the experiment, just use:

./my_experiment/rep.exec

Using VisTrails for Reproducibility

Alternatively, you can use the VisTrails workflow to reproduce, vary and explore the results. You can skip steps 1, 2 and 3 if you had VisTrails already installed when unpacking the experiment.

1. Download VisTrails at http://www.vistrails.org/index.php/Downloads and install it;
2. Create a directory named CLTools under $HOME/.vistrails;
3. Copy the clt file under my_experiment/vistrails/cltools to $HOME/.vistrails/CLTools;
4. Open VisTrails, and go to File -- Import -- Workflow...;
5. Choose the xml file under my_experiment/vistrails;
6. Play with the workflow!

For more information about VisTrails, please visit http://www.vistrails.org