tiny-time-tracker (TTT)

a very tiny time tracker for any executable binary on Windows.

Notes

TTT does not poll target processes and instead relies on Windows security and Task Scheduler to track when a process starts and stops. Because of this TTT has near 0 footprint, only running once when a tracked program is launched and once when the tracked program stops.

Windows Home edition does not come with GroupPolicy tools installed, they need to be installed seperately. Running activate.bat will install these necessary tools directly from Microsoft and enable the necessary policies.

Implementation

• tiny-time-tracker.exe is used to host the WebUI. This is for adding/editing/deleting tracked tasks as well as viewing collected data
• trigger.exe writes playtime to the database. It will run when a tracked app starts/stops

Essentially a Scheduled Task is created when you add a game to the WebUI to run trigger.exe when you run something, and then run it again when it stop. The trigger.exe application then writes this data to the database, which is later read back by tiny-time-tracker.exe.

trigger.exe only runs for a single moment to write to the database then terminates. You also do not need to run the web-ui unless you are viewing/editing, tracking will continue to work. As such there is negligible performance impact all around.

Building

cargo build --release

Usage

1. Enable GroupPolicy tool. Run activate.bat
2. Run tiny-time-tracker.exe as Administrator, then close it. A .db file will be created
3. Make a copy of .env.template, name it .env
4. Fill in the path to trigger.exe as well as the new ttt.db file. (You can relocate these if you want)

After this you can launch tiny-time-tracker.exe and visit http://localhost:3000 to add a new tracked app.