Self hosted FLOSS fitness/workout tracker

> Is this a thing that I don't know about? Or is the market too narrow to be useful? (Otherwise, why doesn't it already exist?)

I'm not super familiar with it, but I think what you describe was/is the goal of Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.org/).

Then there are also efforts like YunoHost (https://yunohost.org/) which are kind of like that, gives SSO auth and everything out of the box for all the apps it supports.

Even easier to use and less involved would be maybe what TrueNAS Core has in terms of apps support, which is essentially also "one-click install" of self-hosted applications, backed by local Kubernetes installation if I remember correctly.

A more involved option for people who want to manage more themselves (both infrastructure and configuration-wise) is using NixOS, which is the approach I chose for my own local infrastructure at home. For the packages supported by NixPkgs, many applications are like ~4 lines of configuration to setup and get integrated with the rest of the apps you run.

All of these options you can run in the cloud, bare-metal or at home servers, afaik.

The problem is that self hosted apps are rarely designed to be run serverless (why would they be?) and giving each app it’a own VPS or hosted container is going to price out the self-hosted crowd, to the point where you might as well be paying for some cloud software.

In particular, self hosted apps usually are using relational databases or SQLite which need persistent disk so can’t run serverless. They also sometimes require writing to physical disk instead of object storage like S3. Writing or rewriting apps to support serverless when they have no technical need to when self hosting would make things more complicated. Most CRUD frameworks used to write self-hosted apps do not work with NoSQL out of the box.

Thing is, almost every self hosted app supports docker now and so if you like, install portainer on a VPS or NUC or raspberry pi and you’ll be able to set up most self hosted apps easily without touching the command line.

Not sure if there is something like that tracker but I think you would like something like Linode marketplace:

https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/

I used to hear that Yunohost was a good option, but I am not certain if this is still used by selfhosters today.

I think the most popular service like this is PikaPods.

Bangle.js 2: https://banglejs.com/

Most Garmin watches _can_ work without connecting to your phone and the app. It just stores the files locally on the watch and you can just connect it to your PC and read the files.

If you just need heart rate, you can pull data off a plain sensor to your phone or to a computer, they report over BLE.

Have you considered sending a PR? :)

Usually the L stands for Libre indicating full freedom of usage of the software and that is not just "free" as a price tag.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

The "F" (free), "L" (libre), and "OS" (open source) all mean the same thing, the acronym is just meant to make extra-sure to include all the ways people refer to that kind of software (last "S).

Libre.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_s...

I believe it means libre or free as in free speech, not free as in free beer.

That TTY typo reveals you're a true nerd ;-)

Inputting data on your smartphone and it appearing on your laptop without any extra sync effort.

My impression is that “hosted” is common parlance for programs that present as web applications, rather than typical executables. A web application is naturally capable of “leaving the laptop” so to speak, which is often one of the benefits/intents of the program design.

I like to think of it not as "computer program with extra steps" but rather "service I can access from anywhere/anytime using any device with added privacy and control".

DISCLAIMER: I'm a backend software engineer so I'm biased.

Because hosting it on a server allows for automatic data entry via a mobile phone app?

No a lot of people would use fitness trackers if you manually had to enter all the information.

For fitness trackers, you're often going to get sensor files directly from a wearable device, but that device may have limited or even no interactive IO facilities, making it unsuitable for planning and analysis, which requires exporting to a more capable device. That device may very well just be your laptop, but you'd still want the ability to directly receive sensor data that your laptop can't collect because you can't hook your laptop up to a heartrate monitor and accelerometer and GPS while you're working out.

For a recipe database, if you're thinking of something like a food logger, having the food database shared by all users instead of local to each user is what allows the data to already be there the first time you ever log that same food. If it has a barcode or simple description and anyone else has ever input the nutrition data associated with it, it's already available to you without every user having to input that data individually.

build it? It's foss

https://github.com/wger-project/flutter/issues/618