tracktime

tracktime is a filesystem-backed time tracking solution. It uses a sane directory structure to organize CSV files that store time tracking data for each day.

Features

• CLI
• Start/stop/resume time entries
• List/edit time entries for a given day
• Generate rST, PDF, HTML reports for arbitrary date ranges (optionally restricted to a particular customer or project)
• Synchronise time spent to GitLab using the Time Tracking API
• Synchronise time spent to Sourcehut via comments on issues

Installation

Using PyPi:

pip install --user tracktime

On Arch Linux, you can install the tracktime package from the AUR. For example, if you use yay:

yay -S tracktime

Dependencies

Report functionality requires wkhtmltopdf to be installed. If you install using the AUR package, this will be installed automatically. Otherwise, you can install it using your distribution's package manager or visit their homepage for installation instructions specific to your operating system.

Additionally, you will need to ensure that the wkhtmltopdf executable is in your $PATH.

Guiding Principles

• Filesystem based (want to be able to use Git to keep track of my time entries)
• Easy to edit manually (not a binary format)
• Must be able to use offline

Configuration Options

There are a number of configuration options that can be set in ~/.config/tracktime/tracktimerc. The tracktimerc file is in YAML format. Here is a link to an example configuration. Below is a list of each of the options and what they do.

• fullname (string) - your full name. This is used for generating reports.

• sync_time (boolean, defaults to false) - determines whether or not to synchronise with external services.

• editor (string) - specifies the editor to use when tt edit is run. If this value is not present, the EDITOR and VISUAL environment variables are used as fallback. If none are present, then vim (on non-Windows OSes) or notepad (on Windows) is used.

• editor_args (string) - a comma separated list of arguments that should be passed to the editor when tt edit is run.

• gitlab (dictionary) - configuration of GitLab parameters

  • api_root (string, defaults to 'https://gitlab.com/api/v4/') - the GitLab API root to use.

  • api_key (string) - can be either your GitLab API Key in plain text or a shell command which returns the API key. This second option can be useful if you want to store your API key in a password manager. To indicate that it is a shell command, append a vertical bar (|) at the end of the command.

    Note: You can create an API key here: https://gitlab.com/profile/personal_access_tokens. The API Key must be created with full API access. Used to sync with GitLab.

• tableformat (string, defaults to simple) - the type of table to generate when exporting a report to stdout. (See the tabulate documentation for details on what formats are supported.)

• project_rates (dictionary) - a dictionary of project-rate pairs. Used to calculate totals for the report export.

• customer_aliases (dictionary) - a dictionary of alias-full name pairs. Used to expand a name on the report export. Useful when a customer has a really long name.

• customer_addresses (dictionary) - a dictionary of name-address pairs. Used in the report export.

• external_synchroniser_files - a dictionary of synchroniser name -> synchroniser Python file. Allows users to import third party synchronisers.

• day_worked_min_threshold - the number of minutes which must be worked in a day to consider it a work day. This is to avoid days where you work for a few minutes from skewing statistical results.

Architecture

Directory Structure

/<root>
|-> 2017
|   |-> 01
|   |   |-> .synced
|   |   |-> 01
|   |   |-> 02
|   |   |-> ...
|   |-> 02
|   |-> ...
|-> 2018

In other words, the generic path is YEAR/MONTH/DAY where all three fields are the numeric, zero-padded.

Each day with time tracked will have a corresponding file and have the file format as described below.

The .synced file in each month's directory stores the amount of time that has been reported to the external services.

Time Tracking File Format

All time tracking files will be CSVs with the following fields:

• start - the start time for the time entry
• stop - the stop time for the time entry
• project - the project for the time entry
• type - the type of entry (gitlab, github, or none)
• taskid - the task ID (issue/PR/MR/story number)
• customer - the customer the entry is for
• notes - any notes about the time entry

The start and stop fields will be times, formatted in HH:MM where HH is 24-hour time. All other fields are text fields that can hold arbitrary data.

Synced Time File Format

All .synced files will be CSVs with the following fields:

• type - the type of taskid (gitlab, github, or none)
• project - the project that the taskid is associated with
• taskid - the task ID (issue/PR/MR/story number)
• synced - the amount of time that has been successfully pushed to the external service for this taskid

Synchronising to External Services

tracktime can sync tracked time with external services. It does this by keeping track of how much time it has been reported to the external service using the .synced file in each month's directory. Then, it pushes changes to the external service.

This is not a two-way sync! tracktime only pushes changes, it does not poll for changes to the external services.

Supported External Services

• GitLab
• Sourcehut

Unsupported Edge Cases

• Daylight savings time (if you are needing to track time at 02:00 in the morning, I pitty you).
• Time entries that span multiple days (if you are working that late, create two entries).
• Timezones (only switch timezones between days, if you have to switch, just make sure that you keep the timezone consistent for a given day).

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING.md document for details on how to contribute to the project.