Maintain a personal diary, with assistance from automated daily journal entries generated from connected third-party APIs.
Maintaining a personal diary has numerous benefits, but I haven't always been able to keep up the habit. I started this project as a way to generate automated outlines for daily journal entries from different sources, such as Google Calendar for the events of a day, and Spotify for the songs I listened to on a day. I can add my own writing on top of these automated diary entries, but even when I don't, I have some information about the day that I can go back to later.
Additionally, this project is an excuse to learn and tinker with a wide variety of digital tools and APIs. I've learned a great deal about developing full-stack software, gaining experience with SQLModel, SQLAlchemy, FastAPI, React, Vue, and Docker Compose, just to name a few. Some of these skills have been helpful professionally, but they've all been pretty fun to learn.
Finally, this project is also the home for some of my own Personal Information. I like to play guitar and sing, for instance, so I use this mydiary database to keep track of all the songs I know how to perform, as well as songs I want to learn.
This is not a plug-and-play solution for starting or maintaining a diary. The primary purpose of the project for me is to tinker, and certainly not to make things easy. There are surely many existing journaling solutions out there, but I made this with a focus on wrangling a bunch of open-source and customizable technologies together with third-party APIs to create something clunky, fun, and bespoke to me. If this resonates with you, maybe you could use what I've done as an example to do something similar for yourself! Just don't expect something easy and working out of box.
Each daily dairy entry has a few different sections, which are connected to other apps and services. The entries are generated as Markdown (.md) files, with these sections outlined and filled in as much as possible.
This is the text part of the diary entry, which I write after the rest as been generated (if I'm not being lazy or otherwise neglecting it). I use Joplin to write and maintain the full entries. Joplin is a Markdown-based note-taking app—sort of an open-source version of Evernote. I sync all of my Joplin notes using the open-source Nextcloud software.
Every day I choose a few images (usually between 1 and 5) and add them to this section. I sync my images to Nextcloud, use a custom system in mydiary to select them and reduce the image sizes in order to keep the full diary more trim.
Mydiary connects to my personal Google Calendar and fills in all the events for a day. I often use my calendar as a lightweight journaling solution, even backfilling things I did in the last few days when I have a few minutes to do so.
I use Pocket as my read-it-later app for internet articles and other content. Mydiary connects to the Pocket API to get the articles I saved, read, and/or favorited on a given day.
I mainly use Spotify to listen to music. Mydiary uses the Spotipy Python library to get my listening history and collect all of the songs I listened to in a day.
Set the following environment variables in a .env file:
SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID=
SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET=
SPOTIPY_REDIRECT_URI=
SPOTIFY_TOKEN_CACHE_PATH=
POCKET_CONSUMER_KEY=
POCKET_ACCESS_TOKEN=
JOPLIN_AUTH_TOKEN=
JOPLIN_BASE_URL=
JOPLIN_NOTEBOOK_ID=
GOOGLECALENDAR_TOKEN_CACHE=
GOOGLECALENDAR_CREDENTIALS_FILE=
GOOGLEPHOTOS_TOKEN_CACHE=
NEXTCLOUD_URL=
NEXTCLOUD_USERNAME=
NEXTCLOUD_PASSWORD=
After making changes or adding or removing any database models (SQLModel models with table=True), run:
alembic revision --autogenerate -m "REVISION DESCRIPTION"
alembic upgrade headpytest --cov=mydiary tests/ --cov-report xml:cov.xml
Mydiary uses Orval to generate client API code from the OpenAPI spec generated by FastAPI. If you change anything in the API (api.py), you can update the client (api.ts) by running npm run generateClientAPI.