Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
69 lines (43 loc) · 2.5 KB

architecture.rst

File metadata and controls

69 lines (43 loc) · 2.5 KB

Architecture

Here we hope to clarify the architecture of ActivityWatch for you. Please file an issue or pull request if you think something is missing.

Dependency graph

The below is a graph of the fundamental dependencies between projects, these do not reflect the folder structure.

.. graphviz:: dependency.dot

Server

Known as aw-server, it handles storage and retrieval of all activities/entries in buckets. Usually there exists one bucket per watcher.

The server also hosts the Web UI (aw-webui) which does all communication with the server using the REST API.

Clients (watchers, importers, and observers)

Since aw-server doesn't do any data collection on it's own, we need watchers that observe the world and sent the data off to aw-server for storage.

These utilize the :doc:`aw-client` library for making requests to the aw-server.

For a list of watchers, see :doc:`watchers`. For a list of importers see :doc:`importers`.

User interfaces

ActivityWatch currently has two user interfaces, aw-qt and aw-webui.

  • :gh-aw:`aw-qt` - Manages the server and watchers to make ActivityWatch easy to use for end-users.
  • :gh-aw:`aw-webui` - Offers visualization and an overview of the database. Hosted by aw-server in the bundle.

Libraries

Some of the logic of ActivityWatch is shared across the server and clients, for these cases we moved some logic into separate libraries.

aw-core

The aw-core library contains many of the essential parts of ActivityWatch, notably:

  • The buckets-and-events
  • The datastore layer
  • Event transformation and queries
  • Utilities (configuration, logging, decorators)

aw-client

Writing these clients is something we've tried to make as easy as possible by creating client libraries with a clear API. A client could both be a watcher which sends data as well as a visualizer which fetches and presents data from the aw-server.

Currently the primary client library is written in Python (known simply as aw-client) but a client library written in JavaScript is on the way and is expected to have the same level of support in the future.

aw-analysis

There are also plans to create a library called :gh-aw:`aw-analysis` to aid in different types of analysis and transformation one might want to make using ActivityWatch data.