Can not activate pavlovia.org experiment after deactivation

I’ve been having trouble activating my experiments on pavlovia. When I pressed the “Activate” button on the dashboard page, I received an error that read:

pavlovia.org says
{“origin”:“http://pavlovia.org/server",“projectId”:2652,“experimentFullPath”:“kevinhroberts/x”,“context”:"when activating, deactivating or updating an experiment”,“error”:“unable to clone project from GitLab repository: [Errno 2] No such file or directory”,“projectName”:“x”}

These are the steps I followed to encounter the error:

  1. I generated the HTML/JS manually from builder.
  2. I manually committed the project to gitlab using the command line, since PsychoPy (v3.0.0b12) seems to crash every time I try to commit the project through PsychoPy.
  3. I activated and launched the experiment from the pavlovia dashboard.
  4. I deactivated the experiment.
  5. I tried activating it again, and it produced the error message above.

I suspect any time I deactivate and try to reactivate a project, I will encounter this message.
To confirm, I just tried this with a previously working project that was simply the online version of the stroop task included with PsychoPy demos. I could deactivate it, but reactivation gave me the same error as above, except that it indicated the stroop project name (stroop2) instead of the other project’s name (x).

I am using Chrome in case that is relevant.

I think the sync problems with PsychoPy are now fixed (3.0.0 just released). The one thing I haven’t handled yet is if you have a merge conflict due to changes on two computers but otherwise I think we’re successfully handling most issues.

And I just successfully deactivated and reactivated a study on the Pavlovia dashboard.

So hopefully these are now fixed but let us know if either are still a problem.

There appear to still be some activation issues. Here’s what happened:

When I ran my experiment “fg_rec3” on pavlovia, it did not run the most recent version of the experiment that was uploaded to gitlab. To attempt to solve this issue, I deactivated the experiment, and then tried reactivating it. It did not reactivate, I instead got this error message in Chrome:

image

I figured I’d run into a similar issue that appears to be caused by deactivation/reactivation, so I thought I’d try to sync a new experiment to gitlab and then activate it on pavlovia. When I tried activating this brand new experiment called “fg_rec4”, I got this error message:

image

In the past when this issue has come up, it’s seemed to resolve itself if I wait a day or two and try again. I’ll see what happens tomorrow!

I have seen this too on one occasion and, as you say, it auto-resolved itself before I could get into debugging. I haven’t found a way to reproduce the problem consistently. Sometimes I can deactivate and reactivate a project just fine. Hard to debug rare errors that autofix themselves! (I’m wondering if this is a sporadic network issue but can’t tell).

Keep posting here, especially if you (anyone) have anything that seems to be a consistent fail that helps us debug it

Thankfully this error seems to have become much more infrequent.

As an update, activation of both of the above experiments worked this morning. If anyone runs into this issue they can just wait a while before trying again.