FreCLI

Freckle CLI client in Ruby.

• Basic time tracking (start, pause, log)

I'd eventually like FreCLI to be a real alternative UI for interacting with Freckle, but have had to scale it down in the short-term due to time constraints. Currently, I'd like to get basic time tracking and logging nailed, as that's the most interesting functionality to me and those around me.

Having said that, I do intend to implement considerably more features. Also note that I'm working on the API client behind this, freckle-api, as FreCLI is developed.

Starts timing the specified project. Project name can be fuzzy.

e.g., to time a project named FreCLI:

frecli time frecli
frecli time frec
frecli time fc

Displays the time on the running timer, if there is one.

Pauses the running timer.

Logs the current timer, adding a description if one is given.

Lists available projects.

• Project selection by name/alias/fuzzy
• Project list
• Log timers of other projects
• Caching
  • Basic caching implementation
  • Cache status
  • Cache everything (that we can)
• Reports (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly)

I've included a very simple Alfred workflow in extras/. You may need to modify it to point to your frecli bin once imported.

All it does is allow you to use FreCLI from anywhere, by typing fr <frecli args>. If you want to help with auto-completion or something, feel free to make a PR, but I think we'll need some proper caching in FreCLI first.

There are a couple of ways to configure FreCLI.

A 'global' configuration can be achieved through a ~/.frecli file or directory. If ~/.frecli is a file, FreCLI will parse it as YAML. If it's a directory, it will parse and merge settings for all files within.

frecli configuration always cascades down to the current directory. This means that if you have the following directory structure:

$HOME/
|-- .frecli # setting_one: foo, api_key: qwerty1234
|-- repos/
   |-- .frecli/
       |-- settings.yml # setting_one: bar
       |-- more_settings.yml # setting_two: 2 , api_key: asdf5678
   |-- project/
       |-- .frecli # project_setting: my_project

and you run FreCLI from ~/repos/project, your settings will be as follows:

setting_one: bar
setting_two: 2
api_key: asdf5678
project_setting: my_project

This will become rather powerful. For example, if you're working on the same project as a team, settings relevant to the project can be added to the project's repository, and everyone in the team will benefit. Such a setting may be the project's ID (though this is not currently implemented), allowing anyone on the team to clock their time on the relevant project when running FreCLI from that project's directory.

The following are available as settings.

Your Freckle API key. You can get this from the Freckle site under 'Integrations & apps' -> 'Freckle API'. Just click on 'Settings' next to 'Personal Access Tokens' and create a token for FreCLI.

If you commit your FreCLI settings — with your dotfiles, for example — you can use a more secure approach:

1. Set it as an environment variable: export FRECKLE_API_KEY="YOURKEY" in a file which is in your repo's ignore list.
2. Set it in a YAML file such as ~/.frecli/secrets.yml'and add it to your repo's ignore list.

Note that for security, you can also set this as an environment variable, which is recommended. Simply add the following to your environment:

export FRECKLE_API_KEY="YOURKEY"

I prefer to put sensitive env variables in ~/.secrets, with the following in my ~/.profile:

if [ -f "$HOME/.secrets" ]; then
  source $HOME/.secrets
fi

The path to send cache. This will contain some serialized (JSON) FreckleApi stuff.

The number of minutes to wait before forcing a refresh on a cached file.

• My work, Lico Innovations for using Freckle and employing the coolest kids in town (I'm the exception).
• The awesome Freckle developers — Thomas Cannon in particular — who shared interest in this project and even gave me a free account for testing!