ActivityWatch/aw-webui

aw-webui

A web-based UI for ActivityWatch, built with Vue.js

Getting started

Getting started with setting up the development environment is pretty straightforward:

# Start an instance of aw-server running in testing mode (on port 5666, with a separate database),
# This is what the web UI will connect to by default when run in development mode.
aw-qt --testing
# or, to run without watchers:
aw-server --testing

# Install dependencies
npm install
# or, to get exact versions of dependencies:
npm ci

# start aw-webui in dev mode
npm run serve

Alternatively, you can run make dev to install dependencies and serve the application locally.

You might have to configure CORS for it to work, see the CORS section below.

You may also want to generate fake data so you have something to test with, see: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-fakedata/

Building

To build the production bundle, simply run the following:

# Install dependencies
npm ci

# Build for production
npm run build

Using a pre-release with your main install

Note: Running a development version of aw-webui with an old aw-server can lead to issues due to version incompatibilities.

By copying the web-assets to your main install

You can run a development version of aw-webui with your main version of ActivityWatch by building it (or fetching the latest build from CI) and replacing the contents of the static directory of your aw-server (or aw-server-rust) installation. For simplicity, back up the original directory for easier switching back.

The assets are stored in the following directories (relative to your installation directory), depending on if you use aw-server-python (default) or aw-server-rust:

• aw-server-python: activitywatch/aw-server/aw_server/static/
• aw-server-rust: activitywatch/aw-server-rust/static/

You can copy the assets manually from your make build or npm run build output to the above locations.

Once you've put the files in the directories, you may have to do a hard refresh in your browser to invalidate any stale caches.

Using --webpath with aw-server-rust

Instead of copying files, aw-server-rust supports loading the web UI from a custom path via the --webpath flag. This is especially useful on platforms where the server bundles static assets into the executable (e.g. Windows):

# Point aw-server-rust to your local build output
aw-server-rust --webpath /path/to/aw-webui/dist

This avoids having to copy files and makes it easy to switch between development and production builds.

Using your main install's data

If you want to actively iterate on aw-webui with your local production data (with your production server running), you'll want to use a development build, automatically update it, and connect to your production data. To do this, in aw-webui source directory, in one terminal window run:

AW_SERVER_URL="'http://localhost:5600'" npx vue-cli-service build --watch --dest=../aw-server/static

If you want to add debugger statements in your code and otherwise break linting rules, you'll need to add a --skip-plugins=no-debugger to that command. Then, in another terminal (with your venv activated) run:

python3 -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1 27180 --directory ../aw-server/static

Tests

Tests can be run with:

npm test

There are also E2E tests. You need to have an aw-server and the web UI running in development mode (with npm run serve, as instructed above). After you have that setup, you can run the tests with:

make test-e2e

Development

CORS

For development, you'll also have to add/change CORS configuration in the aw-server configs by adding cors_origins = http://localhost:27180 to your configuration file /activitywatch/aw-server/aw-server.toml under respective sections (server-testing section when running server in testing mode).

Code structure

One of the first things that happen in the application is the execution of src/main.js. This loads things such as bootstrap-vue and a bunch of other stuff that's globally used (filters, resources).

The main.js file then loads the src/App.vue file, which is the root component of the application.