Hi,

I am able to run my experiment locally (by typing otree devserver in powershell), but when I try to zip it, so that I can deploy it in otreehub (by typing otree zip in powershell), I get the following error: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position  0: invalid start byte. 

I have run numerous experiments in the past without problems, but it is the first time I see such an error, and I have no idea what it means and how I can handle it. 

Please, help! 

Thanks!

As a work around, why don't try zipping it with your default zipping software like WinZip, and rename the file extension from .zip to .otreezip?

Thanks! 

Unfortunately, it doesn't work this way either. If the folder is C:/Experiment where I usually do the otree zip command on powershell, then I zipped the Experiment folder, and then changed the file extension to Experiment.otreezip (I am not sure if these are the actions that I had to perform). When I deployed that on otreehub.com, it yielded the following error: 

-----> Building on the Heroku-20 stack

 !     Push rejected, Failed decompressing source code.
Source archive detected as: Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract

More information: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platform-api-deploying-slugs#create-slug-archive

Solved! 

In the venv\lib\site-packages\otree\management\commands\zip.py file, I had to change in line 118 and 119, 'utf-8' to 'utf-16-le'.