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Timelines App: Backend Integration

Started in 2021 by Florian Arndt out of 💜 for 🕰.

Technical Concept

TL;DR: Timelines App 👉 Share detailed CSV via E-Mail 👉 Collect using IMAP 👉 Deliver time spans to your backend

  1. Track time in Timelines App
    • Time tracked in the Timelines App can be exported to CSV
    • We need the CSV format "Detailed" that requires a "Pro" subscription (currently costs around 20 € per year and user)
    • That CSV format can - at any point in time - be manually shared to an e-mail address. This should be done before reasonable invoicing can take place.
  2. Deliver tracked time to your backend
    • With the aforementioned mechanism this integration can automatically determine important fields of tracked time spans:
      • The user can be identified by the e-mail's sender address
      • [Not coded yet] security can be enhanced with a required, short smtp relaying path, e-mail encryption or a simple passphrase somewhere in e-mails can be required for each user
      • The project identifier can be encoded in the timeline name (using square brackets like [backend project id]). This identifier can then be used to match the project in your backend.
  3. Get Receipts
    • Any user who reported his time can be informed about the state and stats of the import process via a report e-mail

User Guide

Caveats

  1. This tool identifies time spans using their timeline name and the starting time. So whenever one or both of the two change it counts as a new event and gets re-imported. This could be fixed by Timelines App providing a unique identifier for events in the CSV data and this tool using that as the new identifier.
  2. The project identifier needs to be part of the Timeline name like Project XYZ [123] …. This could be automated if the Timelines app supported syncing project metadata with a backend.

Install and run

  1. Using Docker
    1. Install Docker
    2. Run ./docker-run --build
  2. Without Docker
    1. Ensure python3 is installed
    2. Install the dependencies with pip3 install python-dotenv==0.17.0 imapclient==2.2.0 pickledb==0.9.2 requests==2.25.1
    3. Your backend plugin's dependencies like requests
    4. Run python3 run.py

Configuration

  1. Set environment variables. You can:
    • set environment variables (see example.env for a list) in your machine or container
    • copy example.env to .env and customize it to your needs
    • it's likely wise to make sure your imap server has a valid certificate
    • feel encouraged to write your own backend plugin - check out printer_example.py for a trivial example

Deployment

  1. Clone this repo
  2. Install and configure as described in paragraph "Install and run"
  3. Run this tool whenever needed (i. e. using a cronjob or scheduled task)
  4. Monitoring:
    • make sure you get informed if the run.py exit code is not zero
    • you can log/append start+end date of runs as well as std{out,err} somewhere for reference
  5. Happy + want to support this project? You could paypal a donation to [email protected] 🥳
  6. Unhappy? Open an issue or a fork 😄