mood-tracker

This is a Telegram-based Mood Tracker bot. It allows users to record their mood states and other health-related metrics. Mood Trackers are generally "useful for people with mental health conditions — such as depression and anxiety — to help identify and regulate moods".

It can be difficult to get into the habit of tracking your mood. This project aims at making the process of tracking your mood on a daily basis as frictionless as possible, by integrating into a popular messaging app that you may be using on a daily basis anyway.

Cool, so why should I use it?

While this is called a mood tracker, mood is far from the only thing you can track. As a matter of fact, mood may not even be the most important thing to track for you personally. Therefore, this application allows you to track arbitrary mental-health related metrics, making it endlessly customizable to your specific needs.

Maybe you're more interested in your stress levels over time. Maybe you're interested in how your sense of appetite correlates with your anxiety. All of that is doable. Simply select the metrics you would like to track, /record them and /graph them as you like.

Usage

My instance of the bot, dubbed moody, is running here.

You're absolutely free to use it if you like, but if you're more technically inclined, you can host your own instance. Public Docker images and a Helm chart are freely available, as well as some instructions for running down below.

Commands

The available commands are:

• /start: Start the bot and register yourself.
• /record: Record your current mood
• /baseline: Create a baseline record
• /autobaseline: Toggle creation of automatic baseline records.
• /configure: Configure the bot.
• /help: Show the available commands.

Baselines

Baselines are an essential concept to the bot. They represent your personal feeling of "normal".

For example, this could mean eight hours of sleep and a neutral mood (as opposed to depressed or manic). You can record an average day by sending /baseline to the bot. Further, for extended periods of normalcy, you can configure an automatic baseline records to be created at a certain point throughout the day by triggering /autobaseline.

Configuring the bot

There is a frontend to configure the bot to your needs. This is helpful for more complex configuration, such as which metrics to track, which baselines to set, and to even create custom metrics! You can access the configuration frontend by sending /configure to the bot. That will generate a temporary session, in which you can configure the bot to your liking.

Running

You can run this bot in several ways. The easiest way is simply using Docker; however, for production-grade deployments, you may want to use Kubernetes.

In any case, the following things are required to run the bot:

• A TELEGRAM_TOKEN acquired from @BotFather.
• A DATASOURCE_URL and DATASOURCE_PASSWORD for Postgres
• A JWT_SECRET for signing JWT tokens. This can be any random string, but should be kept secret. You can generate one with e.g. openssl rand -hex 32.

Running locally

For strictly local development, the above values are provided in the application-local.yml, except the TELEGRAM_TOKEN. Therefore, you can simply run the application via the following script:

export TELEGRAM_TOKEN=<your-telegram-token>

lifecycle/start-environment.sh  # start postgres
lifecycle/run.sh  # start application

Running in Docker

Warning

This section is not correct right now. Frankly, this is not a workflow that I use; it is likely possible, but I would recommend simply launching a minikube instance and deploying it there via the provided Helm charts.

Here, you will have to actually supply environment variables yourself. For instance, launch Postgres with the following command:

docker network create mood-tracker

docker run -d \
  --network mood-tracker \
  --name mood-tracker-postgres \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=postgres \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=mood-tracker \
  -p 5432:5432 \
  postgres:latest

Then, you can run the bot with the following command:

docker run -d --rm \
  --network mood-tracker \
  --name mood-tracker \
  -e SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=dev \
  -e TELEGRAM_TOKEN=<your-telegram-token> \
  -e DATASOURCE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://mood-tracker-postgres:5432/mood-tracker \
  -e DATASOURCE_PASSWORD=postgres \
  -e JWT_SECRET=<your-jwt-secret> \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  tobiaswaslowski/open-mood-tracker:latest

Running in Kubernetes

For Kubernetes, a Helm chart is provided. You can install it with the following command:

helm upgrade --install \
  --values ./environments/dev/postgres.values.yaml \
  --namespace mood-tracker --create-namespace \
  postgres oci://registry-1.docker.io/bitnamicharts/postgresql

helm upgrade --install \
  --set telegramToken="$TELEGRAM_TOKEN" \
  --values <your values.yaml> \
  --namespace mood-tracker \
  mood-tracker ./charts/open-mood-tracker