I'd love to get some community feedback from active Wakapi users. If you want, please participate in the recent [user survey](https://github.com/muety/wakapi/issues/82). Thanks a lot!
There are different options for how to use Wakapi, ranging from out hosted cloud service to self-hosting it. Regardless of which option choose, you will always have to do the [client setup](#-client-setup) in addition.
**Note:** By default, SQLite is used as a database. To run Wakapi in Docker with MySQL or Postgres, see [Dockerfile](https://github.com/muety/wakapi/blob/master/Dockerfile) and [config.default.yml](https://github.com/muety/wakapi/blob/master/config.default.yml) for further options.
**Note:** By default, the application is running in dev mode. However, it is recommended to set `ENV=production` for enhanced performance and security. To still be able to log in when using production mode, you either have to run Wakapi behind a reverse proxy, that enables for HTTPS encryption (see [best practices](#best-practices)) or set `security.insecure_cookies = true` in `config.yml`.
### 💻 Client Setup
Wakapi relies on the open-source [WakaTime](https://github.com/wakatime/wakatime) client tools. In order to collect statistics to Wakapi, you need to set them up.
1.**Set up WakaTime** for your specific IDE or editor. Please refer to the respective [plugin guide](https://wakatime.com/plugins)
2.**Editing your local `~/.wakatime.cfg`** file as follows
You can specify configuration options either via a config file (default: `config.yml`, customziable through the `-c` argument) or via environment variables. Here is an overview of all options.
| `security.cookie_max_age` | `WAKAPI_COOKIE_MAX_AGE ` | `172800` | Lifetime of authentication cookies in seconds or `0` to use [Session](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Cookies#Define_the_lifetime_of_a_cookie) cookies |
If you want to export your Wakapi statistics to Prometheus to view them in a Grafana dashboard or so please refer to an excellent tool called **[wakatime_exporter](https://github.com/MacroPower/wakatime_exporter)**.
It is a standalone webserver that connects to your Wakapi instance and exposes the data as Prometheus metrics. Although originally developed to scrape data from WakaTime, it will mostly for with Wakapi as well, as the APIs are partially compatible.
Simply configure the exporter with `WAKA_SCRAPE_URI` to equal `"https://wakapi.your-server.com/api/compat/wakatime/v1"` and set your API key accordingly.
If you like this project, please consider supporting it 🙂. You can donate either through [buying me a coffee](https://buymeacoff.ee/n1try) or becoming a GitHub sponsor. Every little donation is highly appreciated and boosts the developers' motivation to keep improving Wakapi!
Since Wakapi heavily relies on the concepts provided by WakaTime, [their FAQs](https://wakatime.com/faq) apply to Wakapi for large parts as well. You might find answers there.
See the related [WakaTime FAQ section](https://wakatime.com/faq#data-collected) for details.
If you host Wakapi yourself, you have control over all your data. However, if you use our webservice and are concerned about privacy, you can also [exclude or obfuscate](https://wakatime.com/faq#exclude-paths) certain file- or project names.
Wakapi was started when I was a student, who wanted to track detailed statistics about my coding time. Although I'm a big fan of WakaTime I didn't want to pay <ahref="https://wakatime.com/pricing)">9 $ a month</a> back then. Luckily, most parts of WakaTime are open source!
Inferring a measure for your coding time from heartbeats works a bit different than in WakaTime. While WakaTime has <ahref="https://wakatime.com/faq#timeout">timeout intervals</a>, Wakapi essentially just pads every heartbeat, that occurs after a longer pause, with 2 extra minutes.
Here is an example (circles are heartbeats):
```
|---o---o--------------o---o---|
| |10s| 3m |10s| |
```
It is unclear how to handle the three minutes in between. Did the developer do a 3-minute break or were just no heartbeats being sent, e.g. because the developer was starring at the screen find a solution, but not actually typing code.
Wakapi adds a "padding" of two minutes before the third heartbeat. This is why total times will slightly vary between Wakapi and WakaTime.
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## 🙏 Thanks
I highly appreciate the efforts of [@alanhamlett](https://github.com/alanhamlett) and the WakaTime team and am thankful for their software being open source.
