Get Started With the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) Command Line Tools

Step 1: Create Your AWS and MTurk Accounts

   Create your Amazon Web Services account at the AWS website.

   Create your Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester account at the Requester web site using the same email address.

    In AWS, go to your Security Credentials page, click "Continue" and then click "Access Keys".

   Create a new Access Key and download the Key File. Note that you can use IAM child accounts if you wish.

Step 2: Set Your Access and Secret Keys

   Open "bin" folder in your Command Line Tool directory (aws-mturk-clt-1.3.4), open "mturk.properties" file.

   Set the following properties to reflect your AWS identifiers:

    access_key=[insert your access key here]
    secret_key=[insert your secret key here]

   Save and close.

Step 3: Create JAVA_HOME Environment Variables

   Download and install the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). After installation, set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to your installation.

   Windows Instructions

  1. Your JRE is usually installed in the following path: C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.XXXX
  2. If you don't see it there, open the Windows command line and type in: java -verbose
  3. That will display your JRE path at the end of the output.

   Setting JAVA_HOME in Windows

  1. Right click "Start".
  2. Open "System".
  3. Click "Advanced System Settings".
  4. Click "Environment Variables".
  5. Create a new variable named "JAVA_HOME" and set the value to your JRE path.

   Create JAVA_HOME in OSX

  1. Open Terminal, and type in: cd ~
    vi .bash_profile
  2. Press "i" to open insert mode, type: export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)
  3. Press "shift" + ":", type "wq", enter. Then type and enter: source .bash_profile
    echo $JAVA_HOME
  4. If you see the path of your JRE, that means you have created JAVA_HOME successfully.

Step 4: Check Your Balance

   Get Account Balance on Windows

  1. Open a Windows command prompt.
  2. Navigate to the following directory: (CLT Directory is the path of folder "aws-mturk-clt-1.3.4") cd [CLT Directory]\bin
  3. Run the following command: getBalance
  4. You should see the following output: Your account balance: $0.00

   Get Account Balance on OSX

  1. Open a Terminal.
  2. Navigate to the following directory: (CLT Directory is the path of folder "aws-mturk-clt-1.3.4") cd [CLT Directory]/bin
  3. Run the following command: ./getBalance.sh
  4. You should see the following output: Your account balance: $0.00

Step 5: You Are Ready to Go!

   Run the sample applications

  1. Amazon Mechanical Turk provides several sample applications that you can run to create HITs. You can then revise the samples to create your own HITs.
  2. To find the sample applications, navigate to the following directory: (CLT Directory is the path of folder "aws-mturk-clt-1.3.4") [CLT Directory]/samples

   Check out the User Guide for more examples and details.