How to run watchers

[yratof]

Stated a few times in the docs are watchers such as aw-watcher-web and aw-watcher-spotify etc. But it's never mentioned how these are run, or where to state them so aw-qt can pick them up and run them.

is aw-watcher-web already included within the server module (hence why there are urls along side titles)?

And how do we go about including new watchers that we can build?

[ErikBjare]

We've currently not implemented any way to add a watcher to be managed by aw-qt. But it's an easy fix, grepping the sourcecode for aw-watcher- should show you where the current watchers are hardcoded.

aw-watcher-spotify is highly WIP and needs minor tinkering to get running, but shouldn't be much problem to a programmer. Install the dependencies with pip and then in the folder run python3 aw_watcher_spotify (which basically says "run the package located in folder aw_watcher_spotify"). You'll also need to identify with the Web API, I think it'll let you know how to in the terminal when you start it. Feel free to make a PR that adds this info to the README!

aw-watcher-web is a browser plugin and is therefore not managed by aw-qt. It's in a similar slightly broken state of WIP as aw-watcher-spotify since it by default tries to connect to port 5666 (as opposed to 5600) for testing purposes. It's an easy fix though, just grep for the port, change it to 5600 and load it as an unpacked extension in your browser. There is no visualization available for it right now, but it does collect data.

[ErikBjare]

Oh, and I should probably add in case you missed:

You don't need to run watchers with aw-qt, it's just a convenience wrapper. All watchers are able to be run standalone, aw-qt just manages their processes.

[ErikBjare]

I started working on something to make running your own modules a lot easier: ActivityWatch/aw-qt#27

[ErikBjare]

Closing this since the question is answered and solutions to make it easier is underway. Please reach out if you have any more questions or if you need help with something!

[yratof]

Awesome – fantastic progress :D Almost managed to get the spotify watcher up and running, but ran into issues with it not detecting user/secret etc

[ErikBjare]

I've stumbled upon that too, created an issue: ActivityWatch/aw-watcher-spotify#4

Please make a comment there with any details you can provide.