How to use ArcherTask

This repo was archived February 2026, due to inactivity.

Below is a tutorial that walks you through setting up ArcherTask for local development and publishing to firebase. All steps are specific to this repo. If you have questions about Honeycomb in general, the Honeycomb documentation provides a more comprehensive overview on how to use Honeycomb.

Minimum requirements

This tutorial assumes that you have the latest version of git and node.js installed. If you don't already have them, please follow the links below to install the appropriate versions for your operating system:

• git
• node

To verify you have these installed, you can run these commands:

git --version
node --version

Clone the repo and install dependencies

Run the following command to clone this repo and install all dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/brown-ccv/ArcherTask
cd ArcherTask

npm install

This will clone this repo and install all JavaScript dependencies required for ArcherTask

Local development for firebase

To develop ArcherTask locally, you need to enable a local firebase emulator. So in your command line, run:

npm run firebase:emulators:start

Then you can start a local development server by running

npm run dev:firebase

The local development server supports hot-reload: whenever your code is updated, the server will instantly reload the latest version of the code.

Work with firebase

Once your code works locally, you can test if firebase works. You will first follow these instructions to prepare your repo for firebase deployment. You also need to do the following:

Populate participants and studies

You might need to populate some participant and study ids before you get started. Please follow these instructions here for more details.

Upload configs

After creating participants and studies, you may also need to add configurations to different participants and studies. By default, there is a settings.json under ./src/config file. You can make a copy of this file and then add the config to firebase with

npm run firebase:upload study_id [participant_id] /path/to/config.json

You can set participant_id to default to add a default config to the study shared by all participants. If Honeycomb cannot find participant_id, it will use the default for the study.

Once this is all done, you will be able to test your code with firebase. You can start a new branch, and submit a PR from that branch. Github will automatically run the continuous integration (CI) workflow and generate a temporary test link for the PR.

Whenever a PR is merged into the main branch, a new version of ArcherTask will be created at https://frank-archertask.web.app/. This is the product version of ArcherTask.

Changing configs

You can always sign into Firebase Console and go to Firestore Database to view the data currently hosted in Firebase. You can change the config for each participant and study by going to /registered_studies/[study_id]/config/[participant_id] to change the config for the participant. You can also change /registered_studies/[study_id]/config/default to change the default config for the study.

Honeycomb

This repo is based on Honeycomb.

Honeycomb is a template for reproducible psychophysiological tasks for clinic, laboratory, and home use. It is maintained by members of the Center for Computation and Visualization and the Neuromotion Lab at Brown University. To learn about installation, usage and deployment please visit our documentation.

Note: previously named Neuro Task Starter, some references may still refer to it as such.

If you use Honeycomb in your work, please cite:

Provenza, N.R., Gelin, L.F.F., Mahaphanit, W., McGrath, M.C., Dastin-van Rijn, E.M., Fan, Y., Dhar, R., Frank, M.J., Restrepo, M.I., Goodman, W.K. and Borton, D.A., 2021. Honeycomb: a template for reproducible psychophysiological tasks for clinic, laboratory, and home use. Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry, 44, pp.147-155.