Nordstrom / elwin

An experimentation platform based on Facebook's Planout

elwin

Checkout choices our simpler/faster impementation.

Elwin is planout as a service. It provides an easy way to run many concurrent experiments.

# for example if you were running a single color test that hashed on userid
$ curl "elwin.example.com/?group-id=team-name&userid=123456789"
{
  experiments: {
    colorTest: {
      color: "#000000"
    }
  }
}

group-id is a tag on the namespace. It determines which tests are returned. Only namespaces that have a matching group-id will be returned.

userid is an input to the experiment. All experiments have a unit used to hash users. Namespaces operate over a unit or set of units to hash users into experiments. These same units are also inputs into the experiment. Experiments must have the same units as their namespace.

Running in docker

The easiest way to get started is using the prebuilt docker images.

# run mongo db
docker run -d \
  --name mdb \
  mongo

# load example data
docker run -d \
 --link mdb:elwin-storage \
 foolusion/elwin-test

# run elwin
docker run -d \
  -p 5000:5000 \
  --link mdb:elwin-storage \
  foolusion/elwin
curl "localhost:5000/?group-id=epe&userid=12345789"

Running in virtualenv

If you want to build from scratch.

git clone https://github.com/nordstrom/elwin.git
cd elwin
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
DB_CONN=mongodb://your-mongo-database:27017 venv/bin/gunicorn myapp:application

Elwin is a philologist.