A high-performance, drop-in replacement for wakatime-cli written in Rust

Chronova CLI tracks your coding activity by monitoring file changes and sending heartbeat data to a Wakatime-compatible backend. Built with Rust for maximum performance and reliability.

✨ Features

• ⚡ High Performance: Built in Rust with async runtime for minimal overhead
• 📡 Offline-First: SQLite queue stores heartbeats locally when offline
• 🔌 Wakatime Compatible: Drop-in replacement for wakatime-cli
• 🔄 Auto-Sync: Background synchronization with retry logic
• 🔐 Multiple Auth Methods: Supports Bearer, Basic Auth, and X-API-Key
• 🐙 Git Integration: Automatic project and branch detection
• 📊 Language Detection: Identifies programming languages from file extensions
• 📝 Structured Logging: Uses tracing for detailed logs

🚀 Installation

Quick Install (Recommended)

Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nx-solutions-ug/chronova-cli/main/install-linux.sh | bash

macOS:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nx-solutions-ug/chronova-cli/main/install-macos.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nx-solutions-ug/chronova-cli/main/install-windows.ps1 | iex

For detailed installation options, manual installation, troubleshooting, and platform-specific requirements, see INSTALL.md.

From Source

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/nx-solutions-ug/chronova-cli.git
cd chronova-cli

# Build release binary
cargo build --release

# The binary will be at target/release/chronova-cli

📖 Usage

Basic Usage

# Track time for a file
chronova-cli --entity /path/to/file.py --language python

# Track with project detection
chronova-cli --entity /path/to/file.py --project my-project

# Track with all options
chronova-cli --entity /path/to/file.rs --language rust --project my-app --lines 42

CLI Options

chronova-cli [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --entity <ENTITY>          Path to the file being edited
  --language <LANGUAGE>      Programming language (auto-detected if not specified)
  --project <PROJECT>        Project name (auto-detected from git if not specified)
  --lines <LINES>            Total lines in the file
  --lineno <LINENO>          Current line number
  --cursorpos <CURSORPOS>    Cursor position
  --write                    Mark as a write operation
  --output <OUTPUT>          Output format: json, text [default: text]
  --today                    Show today's coding time
  --version                  Show version information
  --config <CONFIG>          Path to config file
  --log-file <LOG_FILE>      Path to log file
  --sync                     Sync offline queue immediately
  --offline                  Work in offline mode only
  -h, --help                 Print help

⚙️ Configuration

Chronova CLI uses an INI configuration file located at ~/.chronova.cfg:

[settings]
api_url = https://api.chronova.dev/api/v1
api_key = your-api-key-here
timeout = 30
hostname = my-workstation
log_file = ~/.chronova/chronova.log

Configuration Precedence

Configuration is loaded in the following order (later overrides earlier):

1. Default values
2. Config file (~/.chronova.cfg)
3. Environment variables
4. CLI arguments

Authentication Methods

Chronova CLI supports multiple authentication methods:

• API Key: Set api_key in config or use CHRONOVA_API_KEY env var
• Bearer Token: Use Authorization: Bearer <token> header
• Basic Auth: Username/password combination
• X-API-Key Header: Custom header authentication

🏗️ Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        Chronova CLI                         │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  CLI Layer (cli.rs)                                        │
│  └── Clap-based argument parsing with 40+ flags            │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Core Layer                                                │
│  ├── Heartbeat Manager (heartbeat.rs)                      │
│  ├── Queue System (queue.rs) - SQLite storage              │
│  ├── API Client (api.rs) - HTTP with retry logic           │
│  ├── Sync Manager (sync.rs) - Background sync              │
│  └── Collector (collector.rs) - Git & language detection   │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Infrastructure Layer                                      │
│  ├── Config (config.rs) - INI parsing                      │
│  ├── Logger (logger.rs) - Tracing integration              │
│  └── User Agent (user_agent.rs) - Client identification    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Key Design Decisions

• Offline-First: Heartbeats are always queued to SQLite first, then synced
• Async Runtime: Tokio for handling concurrent operations
• Trait-Based Design: QueueOps, SyncManager traits for testability
• Error Handling: thiserror for custom errors, anyhow for propagation

🛠️ Development

Prerequisites

• Rust (1.70+)
• Cargo

Building

# Development build
cargo build

# Release build (optimized)
cargo build --release

# Run with verbose logging
RUST_LOG=debug cargo run -- --entity test.rs --language rust

Testing

# Run all tests
cargo test

# Run with output
cargo test -- --nocapture

# Run integration tests only
cargo test --test '*'

Code Quality

# Format code
cargo fmt

# Run linter
cargo clippy -- -D warnings

# Check for security vulnerabilities
cargo audit

📦 Dependencies

Crate	Purpose
clap	CLI argument parsing
tokio	Async runtime
reqwest	HTTP client
serde	Serialization
rusqlite	SQLite bindings
git2	Git integration
anyhow	Error handling
tracing	Logging

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Acknowledgments

• Inspired by wakatime-cli
• Built with the amazing Rust ecosystem

📞 Support

For questions or support, please:

• 💬 Email us at support@chronova.dev
• 🐛 Report issues on GitHub
• 📖 Read the documentation

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Made with ❤️ by the Chronova Team