A Serverless Node.js application to help you keep track of time spent on manual tasks in a standardised way. This project was inspired by the time I worked at an early-stage start-up, deciding on which manual tasks to automate is vital to creating a scalable product.
A Google Sheet is used to store the time tracking information along with a list of business activities that can be used to record time against. Google Spreadsheet can be shared with your colleagues with varying permission levels. It provides company wide visibility, makes it easy for anyone download the data as CSV and analyse it for insights.
Here is a 1 min demo of the Time Tracker app. Click on the image to watch the video on YouTube.
Time Track function is deployed as an AWS Lambda function which is served behind an API Gateway. Orchestration of AWS resources and deployment of the application is managed by the Serverless library.
CloudCraft was used to create the architecture diagram.
To start using the application, you would need AWS, Slack and Google accounts.
Go to Google API Console and create a new service account, you could do this under an existing project or create a new project if you would like to scope it.
Make sure you check the "Furnish a new private key" checkbox and set the user role to Owner.
Copy the downloaded file under lib/ directory with the name client_secret.json. These credentials will be used to talk to the Google Sheet API. Check serverless.yml
Google Sheets document template can be found here which you can just do File -> Make a copy...
Once you've created a copy of the file, click the Share button on the top right hand corner and share the file with the Service Account ID we have created in the previous step.
While we are here take a note of the Google Spreadsheet ID, which should be visible in the URL.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/SPREADSHEET_ID_IS_HERE/edit?usp=sharing
Copy the spreadsheet ID and paste it to the serverless.yml config.
Once you have done the above steps, you can deploy time tracker application to AWS. In order to do that, you'll need to find out your AWS Access Key Id and Access Key. You should export those variables then run serverless deploy to deploy the application.
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<your-key-here>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<your-secret-key-here>
# AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY are now available for serverless to use
serverless deploy
When AWS deploy is finished, you'll get the URL of the AWS API Gateway endpoint dumped to the console. Take a note of that URL because we'll use it to set-up the Slack Integration.
After deploying the app to AWS, you should now have the URL to the AWS API Gateway which probably looks something like this https://XXXXXXXXXX.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/track.
Now go to Slack Apps Dashboard and create a new application.
When you've created the new application, click on the Add Features and Functionality section and choose Slash Commands.
Fill in the Slash Command details as below.
Congrats, you've deployed the time tracker application fully now. 🎉
Time Tracker Application accepts 3 commands.
\track help to display help
\track list to display list of business activities supported. These can be edited by going to the activities tab of the Google Sheet.
track COMPANYNUMBER "business activity" 12m Track time command
/track COMPANYNUMBER "activity name or alias" duration
Duration examples: 01:11:20 or 11:20 or 1h or 1m or 1s
eg: /track 12345678 "called the client" 12m
In its current state time track application only accepts valid UK company numbers, but this feature can be switched off by commenting out the these lines.
If you encounter any problems or issues while setting project up, please raise an issue on the repo. Contributions and feedback are welcome.