What?

This is the little API consumer that could for the time tracker Harvest. All this does is connects to Harvest and finds out how many hours a user has logged for the current semi-monthly period. Alternatively, you can see how many hours the user has logged in the past year that remain uninvoiced.

How?

Enter your credentials into config/authentication.yml. If the file doesn't exist, just create it first based on config/authentication.yml.example. Note that you must put your user_id which you can find inside the querystring of most Harvest requests when using their website.

Next, run it with either uninvoiced support:

UNINVOICED=true ruby ticktock.rb

Or with semi-monthly support:

SEMIMONTHLY=true ruby ticktock.rb

This will output to a file inside the directory called .hours with a float value representing how many hours for that user.

Automate it!

I have the following in my ~/.bash_profile:

parse_hours() {
  [ -e /path/to/ticktock/.hours ] && cat /path/to/ticktock/.hours
}
set_ps1() {
  # ... Lots of other things here that aren't relevant ...

  local hours=`printf "%.2f" $(parse_hours)`
  PS1="[$hours] \t:"
}

PROMPT_COMMAND += 'set_ps1;'

This works in conjunction with a script used by crontab at ~/bin/tick:

#!/bin/sh
source /path/to/.rvm/scripts/rvm
cd /path/to/ticktock
ruby ticktock.rb

I have this installed to crontab using:

*/30 * * * * /bin/bash -c '. $HOME/.bashrc && UNINVOICED=true ~/bin/tick'

Or for semi-monthly support:

*/30 * * * * /bin/bash -c '. $HOME/.bashrc && SEMIMONTHLY=true ~/bin/tick'

So, every 30 minutes I get an update on my terminal like magic. This relies on you having run bundle install inside your default Ruby (in my case using chruby) so that all the required gems are available.