Monday, January 7. 2019
Moving back to RunnerUpWeb
Long time ago I started to develop a silly web aplication that was a backup of my running activities, the application was called RunnerUpWeb and I tried to integrate it inside the RunnerUp phone application. I abandoned the project because members of the community explained me that there was another Runalyze project that was intensively developed as free software (and it was a complete training application, not like my stupidly simple application). I have been using my own Runalyze installation since then but, sadly, Runalyze project is defunct now. I realized about this when the alpha release for RunnerUp was discussed about. I do not know what really happened but the developers of Runalyze has closed the github project and now they are developing the application as proprietary software. It can only be used through its public internet site (like any of the other sites that exist for the same exact purpose).
Therefore very soon I will not be able to synchronize my running activities to Runalyze. The changes I made to make both apps interop are going to disappear (as soon as RunnerUp 2.0 is ready) and only synchronization to the public Runalyze repository will be available. I refuse to use any public repository to store my data (I have already said the same several times in this blog, so I am not going to repeat my reasons again), so I needed a new idea. In the same bug I discovered the death of Runalyze as an open source project I was recommended to just backup my activities using OwnCloud/NextCloud. That was really an easy idea to just maintain a backup of my activities, because I already have a NextCloud server in my desktop for phone maintenance.
RunnerUp phone application can be configured to save a TCX file in a directory inside the phone as soon as the activity is finished. In Settings → Accounts → Tap on the Folder account and configure the directory you want to use to export the activities. I selected the automatic upload to immediately save the file.
Then using the NextCloud application any directory can be configured to be synchronized to the desktop. Settings → Auto Upload → Tap on Set up a custom folder. Configure the same directory used in RunnerUp to automatically be in synch with the NextCloud server (the option to delete the original file was also selected, this way the TCX file is deleted as soon as it is backed up in the server).
So, just using default RunnerUp and NextCloud phone applications my running activities are stored in my own server. My main target was achieved this way. I have a backup of my activities, but, obviously, I was going to lose the possibility of seeing them as I was doing with Runalyze. I do not use any of the other things that Runalyze gives, but I checked some data from time to time (I was running more or less than the previous month or year, faster or slower,...). Finally I decided to reawaken my old RunnerUpWeb project and during this Christmas period I have been working on it. I have tested it with PHP 7.2, moved the web part to npm and react and documented slightly how to install it. And it is working again. It is still very very simple but activities are displayed and some data can be obtained from it.
The last point was how to upload the activities to the new application. Doing something fancy like I tried before with RunnerUp was completely out of my mind (I am tired of that) and having the TCX files in NextCloud makes the things much easier. Now the RunnerUpWeb has a workout.php command line script that let you upload TCX files. This way the RunnerUp application saves the activity in the folder, NextCloud phone app synchs it to the server and finally a cron job uploads that file to RunnerUpWeb (using the workout command line). Easy and effective. I think that now I am safe and no change will ruin this again in the future. I am using plain functionality of the apps. RunnerUpWeb is just a toy project but seeing my activities in the web is very nice. Indeed it is the only thing I missed from Runalyze. So, for the moment, I am done. I will proceed to uninstall my Runalyze setup in a few months if I see everything is working as expected.
Regards.
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