How to deploy a custom watcher?

[Alwinator]

I have now nearly finished my table height watcher. How can I deploy it? At the time I always start it with:

poetry run aw-watcher-table

How can I setup that my watcher automatically starts when ActivityWatch starts?

[johan-bjareholt]

There's a PR in progress which unfortunately seems to be stalled to run other modules in aw-qt, but it is not merged yet.

ActivityWatch/aw-qt#56

Hopefully you could help out with testing it on windows, contributing or just comment that you are interested in the feature to revive the discussions on it.

[Alwinator]

I'm back from vacation and want to continue with this task. Unfortunately there is no documentation available about this topic yet. I have read through the linked pull request and looked a little bit in the installation directory from ActivityWatch, but I don't fully understand how it works. Should I build my watcher with pyinstaller and than move it in the ActivityWatch installation directory? And which tool should I use for Linux? Or is there a better way?

[Alwinator]

@johan-bjareholt @ErikBjare Could you please answer my question?

[ErikBjare]

@Alwinator Sorry for the late reply.

The PR Johan mentioned is now merged, and will be in the next release. You said in the thread that you would try it out on Windows, did you?

Using the latest aw-qt (unreleased), you should be able to just edit ~/.config/activitywatch/aw-qt/aw-qt.ini and add your watcher to the list of autostart modules. For aw-qt to detect the module, the executable needs to:

1. Begin with aw- (such as aw-server, aw-watcher-afk, etc)
2. Exist either in your PATH or in a subdir (which also needs to begin with aw-) of the main activitywatch folder (where the aw-qt executable is)

To get the executable, you might want to run PyInstaller. It's possible you could get it working without it (maybe by creating a .bat or PowerShell script), but I'm not sure how that could be done on Windows.

If the module is detected, it should show up in the trayicon menu under "Modules".

See the code here for the exact module detection logic: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/aw-qt/blob/3db74cddd1cfd0c5aa8baf1a989ba27fa0145b3c/aw_qt/manager.py#L55-L92

[Alwinator]

@ErikBjare Thank you for your reply! Now I think i know how it works. And yes I will try it on Windows.

[Alwinator]

I think this should be closed. It works like a charm with my aw-watcher-table. Even on Windows!

[ErikBjare]

Excellent! It'll be properly available in the next release.