Idea: General Data Tracking App (and dev setup help)

Hello all,

I’d like to create an app where users can track any data. Filtering, creating complex statistics, an API and relating data comes later. For now it’s just registering data plus the graphs.

My personal reason for this app idea is that for the new year I’d like to track data regarding my progress on my new years resolutions. For example, quitting smoking, losing weight, working out, etc. I’d like to track user-timestamp-data sets of information. So for example, cigarettes smoked per day, or weighing myself before breakfast and before bed.

If there is such an app, I’d like to know about it. If there is no such app, I’d like some help getting setup to create a development environment. I’ve got about a decade of web development and server management experience. I’ll be developing on a raspberry pi 3B running Buster. I have a production environment on a raspberry pi 4 (nextcloudpi).

There are probably some design requirements I have not yet considered since I’m not too familiar with the inner workings of Nextcloud. My greatest concern is with my database design, since changing a database half-way through development is a nuisence.

I would very much appreciate the help getting setup, although I can handle the rest once I can get going. Extended help is welcome but not required.

It is my hope tons of people will benefit from my app.

Cheers,
Resolutions

hello fellow new developer,

here is a partial answer to your questions.

I also went through the questions of setting up the dev environement. you can try:

  • Bitnami LAMP Stack and installing nextcloud on it
  • installing all dependencies directly on your system (i don’t recommend it)
  • using docker (docker-nextcloud-env etc)
  • setting up a nextcloud vm and using remote ssh connection with vscode (there might be some other editors which support this, idk).

I chose the latter, for convenience and because it is pretty straightforward. but using docker also works.

Good luck.

Thank you for the response. Do you happen to know whether there’s a special development setup of Nextcloud that’s different from production? Or can I just setup a new production Nextcloud with which to tinker? From your reply and based on my own preliminary findings, I can just tinker with the production variant.

In that case, I’ll be installing nextcloudpi on an SD card and run that on a raspberry pi.

hello,

sorry, been quite busy to respond. yes i pulled the latest production version and just enabled debug mode.