punch-web

Punch is a minimally viable time tracking web app. Very minimally viable. In fact, all it does at this time is allow the user to punch-in, punch-out, and show a report of accumulated hours over recent days and weeks.

Punch has the notion of "gross time" versus "net time", the former being the total time elapsed between punch-in and punch-out events, and the latter subtracting a fixed amount of overhead time per work session (currently 15 minutes) to account for the ramp-up period before one is productive after starting work for the day or after an interruption.

Punch is written in Rust using the actix-web web framework, Diesel for database ORM, and numerous other crates. When you build punch with "cargo build", be sure to have the SQLite libraries installed on your system. On Ubuntu, for example:

apt install sqlite3 libsqlite3 libsqlite3-dev

To start using punch, first initialize its SQLite database with a username and password for the user:

punch-web init --database-url=/path/to/punch.db myusername mypassword

The --database-url argument is optional, and defaults to "punch.db" in the current directory.

To run the web server, use the "server" subcommand:

punch-web server --bind 127.0.0.1:8080 \
    --database-url=/path/to/punch.db --static-path=/path/to/static/files

The bind address and port defaults to 127.0.0.1:8080, the database URL defaults once again to "punch.db" in the current directory, and the path to static resources defaults to "static/" in the current directory.

Ideas for future improvements

For a glorified notepad with aspirations of being a time tracker, what couldn't be improved? A few possible ideas are:

• Support adding text notes to punch-in and punch-out events. Also support a "note" event for adding timestamped notes without punching in or out.
• Support multiple projects and users. The database schema is in place for this, but this minimally viable code currently looks for a singleton user and project.
• Dates are always stored in the database as UTC, but we currently use the server's local time zone when interpreting dates. This may or may not be the user's preferred time zone. We should support per-user or per-project configurable time zones.
• A proper frontend with AJAX calls could lead to a cleaner implementation, at the expense of having to develop such frontend code. (For example, this could avoid the hokey system of storing error messages in a cookie to survive the redirect after a form post.)
• Numerous per-project parameters could be added to alter time accounting. For example:
  • Configurable overhead time.
  • Rounding time up, down, or to the nearest hour (or half hour, quarter hour, etc.) on a per-session, per-week, or per-day basis.
  • Accumulation of "vacation" time at specified rates to allow the user to reward himself or herself after logging enough productive time.
• A command-line interface, which could be implemented as HTTP client calls to REST endpoints.
• More reports.

License

Punch is distributed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0). See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details.

Contributing

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution you intentionally submit for inclusion in the work, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual-licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.