A few weeks ago I started looking into options for time tracking software. The goal is to be more aware of how I spend my time throughout the day.
I could selfhost something with the Raspberry Pi I have lying around the house
The intrusive thought prevailed, so here's a condensed/quick tutorial of how I made it work
Timetagger
The aarch64
architecture of the Raspberry Pi 4 I wanted to use didn't make this straightforward. I looked for open source projects written in Python for better/easier compatibility.
I chose timetagger.app (github repo) and only a couple days after getting everything running I found the web app quite pleasant to use. I highly recommend it if interested in something like this.
Requirements
- Raspberry Pi
- 4 CPU + 8GB RAM runs the project like it's nothing so lower-end versions should also work
- I have a 64bit chip but installed 32bit OS (lite) because packages/tools on 64 bit OS were difficult to work with
- A domain with DNS managed on Cloudflare
- Tunnels will allow you access your server publicly with a subdomain
You'll want to have your Raspberry Pi running in your local network. I won't cover the basics here, so I'm assuming you can ssh user@host.local
to your device at this point. Read getting started guides if needed.
Run the server
Timetagger has good docs and articules to help you get started with self hosting. Most of what I did I learned it from this article. Rapid fire summary:
- Ensure Python & pip are installed
python -m pip install -U timetagger
- Create a dir to keep data
sudo mkdir /opt/timetagger
- Change ownership (to yourself)
sudo chown -R [user]: /opt/timetagger/
- You can now run the server using
python -m timetagger
and you'll want to use ENV vars:-
TIMETAGGER_CREDENTIALS=XXXX
for username/password hash (generate here) TIMETAGGER_LOG_LEVEL=info
TIMETAGGER_BIND=0.0.0.0:8080
TIMETAGGER_DATADIR=/opt/timetagger
-
The web app should now be reachable in your local network on host.local:8080
Cloudflare Tunnels
We want to access the app from anywhere in the world, not just from your WiFi at home.
Kudos to the amazing tutorial from pimylifeup.com which was the source of all I know related to the use of Cloudflare tunnels on a Raspberry Pi. Be sure to check that one out for more details on each step below:
sudo apt update & sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install curl lsb-release
curl -L https://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-main.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/cloudflare-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/cloudflare-archive-keyring.gpg] https://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflared $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cloudflared.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install cloudflared
cloudflared tunnel login
cloudflared tunnel create TUNNELNAME
cloudflared tunnel route dns TUNNELNAME DOMAINNAME
cloudflared tunnel run --url localhost:8080 TUNNELNAME
I used a subdomain under the fdo.cr
domain that I own. You should now be able to reach the web app outside your local network!
systemd services
We want the server + cloudflared
to run in the background and start on boot. For this we'll use systemd
and luckily cloduflared
makes it simple:
- Create a config file at
~/.cloudflared/config.yml
(example below) sudo cloudflared --config ~/.cloudflared/config.yml service install
sudo systemctl enable cloudflared
-
sudo systemctl start cloudflared
tunnel: [TUNNELNAME]
credentials-file: /home/[USERNAME]/.cloudflared/[UUID].json
ingress:
- hostname: [HOSTNAME]
service: http://localhost:8080
- service: http_status:404
We'll do the same for the timetagger server (manual systemd
setup). Start by creating /user/local/bin/timetagger_boot.sh
(example below). I used a sleep to delay boot and added ENV vars directly, a.k.a. the easiest/laziest solution.
#!/bin/bash
echo "Waiting 5s before startup..."
sleep 5
echo "Starting the server!"
TIMETAGGER_CREDENTIALS=XXXXXXXXXX \
TIMETAGGER_LOG_LEVEL=info \
TIMETAGGER_BIND=0.0.0.0:8080 \
TIMETAGGER_DATADIR=/opt/timetagger \
python -m timetagger
Now create /etc/systemd/timetagger.service
(example below). Notice this example is using your user to run the service (not root).
[Unit]
Description=Timetagger service
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0
[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=timetagger_boot.sh
Restart=always
RestartSec=30
User=[USERNAME]
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Finally systemctl daemon-reload
or sudo reboot
to ensure the services are available on your public subdomain.
Performance
Browsing the app (relatively aggressively) while looking in htop
shows 0.12
on load average which is basically nothing. I ran a quick benchmark with ab -n 10000 -c 10 https://[SUBDOMAIN].fdo.cr/timetagger/app/demo
and saw these results:
Document Path: /timetagger/app/demo
Document Length: 11559 bytes
Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 200.090 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 7
(Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 7, Exceptions: 0)
Total transferred: 121439275 bytes
HTML transferred: 115516711 bytes
Requests per second: 49.98 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 200.090 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 20.009 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 592.70 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 112 56.5 97 1169
Processing: 44 87 38.4 79 1228
Waiting: 41 82 35.8 74 1227
Total: 109 200 69.7 180 1459
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 180
66% 196
75% 212
80% 225
90% 278
95% 329
98% 402
99% 458
100% 1459 (longest request)
There are lots of caveats to note, i.e. the fact 10 concurrent users is 10x what this server will ever face, it doesn't resemble real user behavior and follow up requests come in immediately one after the other.
Regardless of the caveats, a few of the noteworthy stats from the results:
- The test transferred a total of 115 MB of HTML in 200s (~0.57 MB per second)
- Requests had a mean time of 200ms and a
P95
of 329ms - Load averge on
htop
barely went over 1 (out of 4 CPUs on the device)
Considering it's running SQLite and the Python server connected publicly with a Cloudflare Tunnel (CPU hungry process) I can say the Raspberry Pi is impressively powerful.
Conclusion
A $35-ish home server vs what a subscription service could cost per year
I find that ^ comparison an interesting one. Proprietary SaaS offerings have delightful UI/UX and lots of extra integrations/tools, but could cost $50 or $100+ per year. Timetagger itself notably sells a lifetime plan for β¬144 which I would consider if I were to stop selfhosting.
I saw generous Free tiers but they wipe out your historic data or have some other way to hook you into subscribing. No hate intended, it's business strategy.
For my needs, the OSS project I can run on my server at home will be my preferred choice.
A $35-ish home server vs $5-ish/month VPS
This ^ other comparison is easily won by the Raspberry Pi home server. $60/year will get you 1 CPU (shared), 1-2GB RAM and limited SSD on a cloud provider. A Raspberry Pi has 4x those specs with large SD card storage limits if needed (30GB are plenty and cheap though).
You would benefit from the uptime and high bandwith + low latency connection of a datacenter when compared to your house WiFi, but that's about it. For a hobby project this will be perfect.
Kudos to all the people working on OSS (and writing about it) that made this weird weekend project a reality. Also, hats off if you've made it this far reading and/or are willing to try this out for yourself. Pura Vida!
Top comments (7)
Cool AF! Considering it's just for one service, maybe even a cheaper *PI would work with this setup, so it's even less than $35 π₯·π½
(I would use Cloudflare tunnel AND nginx proxy manager, but tomato tomato, if you don't have extra services running that's OK)
Fully agree! I'm hoping to install more stuff on that Pi given it's barely breaking a sweat at the moment lol
Oh yeah, once I start hosting other services I'll have to check out how to map them all out. I believe the
~/.cloudflared/config.yml
could work it out on its own using different ports to map to different DNS services, so might not need nginx...But I'm not 100% positive on this yet. I'll keep it in mind whenever the time comes!
This sounds freaking dope, Fernando!
Can you explain a bit about how time-tracking software works? I'm not that familiar with this. Curious how you're inputting what you're doing, or if it's reading your todo list in any way or somehow automated... sorry if this is already explained and I just missed it.
Speaking of missing stuff, I miss ya! Pura Vida. π€π₯π€
Sure thing! It's very simple, you log your hours and it serves as a "log notebook" for you to keep track.
You can "start a timer" and then stop it a few hours afterward, it will track the start/end times. You can also add a few records "after the fact" by putting in start/end times. You tag each log record and add more details (I only use hashtags for now). It looks like this:
I believe the Timetagger project has an API you could use to automate stuff and there is feature to leverage the Pomodoro technique:
I'm only using it manually for keeping track of my time, but I'll likely dive into their docs to improve my workflow in the future π€πΌ
Right back at ya (+ Forem friends) dude! We should have another e-coffee call sometime soon to catch up ππΌ
Nice!! This is a super helpful explanation. Now, I totally get it. Thank you!!
On the note of the e-coffee, heck yeah! Let's do it. I'll hit you up very very soon!!
Really cool!
Thanks Ben! It's easy/fun to
fightplay with these things for hours