Autology

Autology is a text file based life log. Using the contents of markdown files (to include frontmatter) it will provide a collection of reports for later viewing. It currently uses git as a backend for syncing between multiple clients.

Contributing

Please report all software issues to Bug tracker. Any issues associated with the templates that are provided by default should be reported to the Autology Template Bug Tracker.

Installation

It is recommended that you use this tool in a virtual environment associated with the directory that you'll be using to store all of the content.

mkdir log; cd log
python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

pip install autology

To create the log directory structure, execute:

autology init

This will retrieve the template files from GitHub, and create a new config.yaml file with the default values of all of the parameters that can be used.

Configuration

Git Storage

In order to use this log with git as the backend you will need to modify the config.yaml file and enable git support. The first time it is run, it will initialize a git environment (if necessary). Configuring the git environment with a remote and refspec will allow the make_note sub-command to push the changes to the backend of your choosing.

Configuring Editor

By default, the editor used to modify the text files is xdg-open. Depending on the editor that is currently set as the default, this may not work correctly. For example, executing gvim will automatically return when the editor is opened instead of waiting for the user to save and close the file. To get around this, you will need to set the value of the editor to something more sane. To continue the example of gvim, the setting is:

make_note:
  editor: gvim -f {file} +2

You will need to provide the full command for the editor, including the {file} parameter. The -f flag is responsible for executing the tool in the foreground. +2 moves the editor to the second line of the file (skipping the opening frontmatter tag).

Execution

To generate a new note file, use the following command while the virtual environment is activated.

autology make_note

Once you have some notes, you can then use the generate sub-command to translate the log files into a HTML output.

autology generate

To view the content that has been generated, you can use the serve sub-command to create a simple http server for viewing. Note this server does not auto-generate the content on changes, and is incredibly slow. As such, you should not use it in production.