NOTE: ask me about registration-log.py eventually. This is published as-is as for now, but missing parts and bits (personal configuration, plugins, etc) and missing documentation.

This is primary made for employees of Redpill-Linpro. This may be useful for others using achievo as well, I'd be happy to know if the script works out of the box or not for other achievo instances.

For support and ideas, contact tobias@redpill-linpro.com, or /msg tobias at irc.redpill-linpro.com

Quickguide optimized for fellow colleagues

• Clone the repository

  git clone https://github.com/tobixen/achievo-register.git

• Set up $HOME/.achievorc like this:

  ACHIEVO_USER=$LOGNAME
  ACHIEVO_PASS="dead stapled horse eating battery"
  [ -z "$ACHIEVO_URL" ] && ACHIEVO_URL="https://${ACHIEVO_USER}:dead%20stapled%20horse%20eating%20battery@secure.redpill-linpro.com/achievo"

• Run the script like this:

  achievo-register/achievo-register.sh drf-div 00:15 "research and setup of achievo-register.sh"

Install & use

Trygve Vea (tv at redpill-linpro) has made a wrapper-script bill with argument handling and usage instructions. Said script contains hard-coded constants which may be site-specific, but will probably work out of the box for employees at Redpill-Linpro.

Currently the achievo register script is a simple stupid bash script that takes three positional mandatory arguments - the project code, the number of hours and the remarks. Since option passing in bash is painful, environment variables are used for passing options and configuration:

• ACHIEVO_USER - defaults to $LOGNAME, which is usually sane, but it's nice to set this environment variable to avoid the warning from the script.
• ACHIEVO_PASS - by default the script will read it from stdin.
• ACHIEVO_URL - mandatory configuration variable.
• ACHIEVO_DATE - date the work was performed (defaults to "today")
• ACHIEVO_BILLPERCENTID - defaults to 1 for "normal (100%) billable". For Redpill Linpro, 3 is alternatively the most useful value (non-billable).
• ACHIEVO_PHASEID - integer for the phase ID. Need not be set for projects with only one phase.
• ACHIEVO_TMPDIR - mostly for debugging purposes - if set, the script will store temporary files in this directory, and will delete the directory after usage. With ACHIEVO_TMPDIR set to some directory, the given directory will be used, and no cleanup will be performed.
• ACHIEVO_ACTIVITYID - yet another integer ID. The default value is 9, but this default is slightly Redpill-Linpro-specific.

KNOWN BUGS

• very sloppy support for various options. For employees at Redpill-Linpro the bill script corrects this a bit, but it contains hardcoded constants that are most likely site-specific.
• Not very well tested - always follow up by checking the Web UI that the registration has gone correctly through

General thoughts

Our Achievo is annoyingly slow. I've tried to look a bit on it - it does queries like "what projects have you been working on during the last two months?" on a big table with all the time registrations just to populate the select-box with available projects. This could probably be fixed by caching on the application side ... but PHP coding is not my cup of tea, someone else eventually has to look into that.

Even if achievo would have been fast, it's a significant overhead to register hours - depending on how fine-grained and exact one wants the registrations to be.

The "Timesheet" view in the webui is handy for reviewing and editing all time registrations for a full day. I think it would be a useful workflow to have the timesheet prefilled with information gathered from other tools and then manually look through and edit.

General wishes

1. Utility to throw in registrations (like work done and billable hours) into achievo via the command line (to avoid spending time browsing through menues)

2. Integrations between achievo and other tools (i.e. RT) to avoid manually copying data from one tool to another.

3. New ways to keep track of how much time I've spent on different projects.

This simple-ugly bash script solves #1 above. I will eventually make another simple-ugly wrapper bash script to solve #3 above. This script doesn't really solve #2 above - though, I'm planning to introduce some wrapper scripts to help me with this as well.

Design ideas

This is an ugly bash script ... I did consider some options:

1. Use achoo. I attempted to go this way, but achoo wasn't the command line tool I hoped it to be - achoo is a text user interface. Since my purpose is to get away from the user interface and menus, achoo doesn't help me.

2. Build on achoo. I looked a bit into it, but it doesn't seem trivial to tap into the ruby framework. At least not for me, considering my limited ruby knowledge.

3. Tap directly into the database. That seems like the easiest route for me - but then again, it's safest to do the registrations through the application to make sure all the business logics, data integrity checks, permission checks etc passes.

4. Edit the PHP to make some easy-to-use API - but then again, I don't feel like diving into the PHP code.

5. Stupid-ugly bash-script using curl, wget or similar to push through registrations through a bare minimum of HTTP requests. This was eventually chosen - KISS, curl+bash+perl is installed on nearly any linux-box, and the achievo web-UI is considered to be quite static. Since option handling is messy in bash, I'm passing options through environment variables ... stupid-ugly :-)

6. As #5, but use perl or python. I was seriously considering to make a switch when I was half-way through implementing #5 - but then again, there is a risk that I'd have to make dependencies using extra libraries. Also, python is my favorite ... but with python now it's slightly non-trivial to make sure the script works on all distros due to the python2/python3 incompatibility (no guarantee that python3 is installed, no guarantee that #!/usr/bin/python will invoke python2, and no guarantee that the symlink /usr/bin/python2 exists ...) ... plus that I have some bad memories using library methods on https, certificates, basic-auth etc in python2.