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.

Contents

• Architecture

  • Dependency graph

  • Server

  • Clients (watchers, importers, and observers)

  • User interfaces

  • Libraries

    • aw-core

    • aw-client

    • aw-analysis

Dependency graph

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

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 aw-client library for making requests to the aw-server.

For a list of watchers, see Watchers. For a list of importers see Importers.

User interfaces

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

• aw-qt - Manages the server and watchers to make ActivityWatch easy to use for end-users.

• 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 Data model

• 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-client (Python)

• aw-client-js (TypeScript/JavaScript, beta)

• aw-client-rust (Rust, work in progress)

aw-analysis

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