Baby Tracking App

Track your baby's eating, sleeping, and diapers with your partner. Two-person login, a fast entry form, and a month-at-a-glance calendar. Works on laptop and phone screens.

First-time setup

Follow these steps to get the app running on a fresh machine. You'll need Docker with Docker Compose (included with Docker Desktop, or install the compose plugin for the Docker engine on Linux).

1. Get the code

git clone git@github.com:tylern4/baby-tracking-app.git
cd baby-tracking-app

2. Create your configuration

Copy the example environment file and edit it before going live:

cp .env.example .env

Open .env and set:

Variable	What it's for
POSTGRES_USER	Database username (default baby is fine)
POSTGRES_PASSWORD	Database password. Change it for anything other than local use.
POSTGRES_DB	Database name (default baby is fine)
JWT_SECRET	Secret used to sign login tokens. Set a long random string.
INVITE_CODE	Private code required to register. Set something secret and share it only with your partner.

Generate a random value with e.g. openssl rand -hex 32.

3. Start the services

docker compose up --build -d

The first build takes a minute or two. When it finishes, three containers are running:

Service	Container name	Address
Database	baby-db	localhost:5432
Backend	baby-backend	localhost:8000
Frontend	baby-frontend	http://localhost:8080

The containers restart automatically if they crash or when the host reboots (restart: unless-stopped), so as long as Docker starts on boot the app comes right back up. Check status any time with docker compose ps.

4. Create the admin account

Open http://localhost:8080/register in your browser and sign up:

• Your name and email — keep email something your partner can remember, it's your login.
• A password (bcrypt-hashed on the server).
• The invite code from your .env.

The first account to register becomes the administrator and is activated immediately. Anyone else can only create an account if they know the invite code.

5. Invite your partner

Register a second account the same way (on another device or in a private window), using the same invite code. That account starts as pending — it cannot log in until you approve it.

Sign in as the admin, open the Admin page, and click Allow next to your partner's account. They can now log in too.

6. Start tracking

On the calendar, tap any day, then press Add to record an entry. Choose Feed, Sleep, or Diaper, set the date and time (times snap to 15-minute increments), and save. It's a shared calendar — every entry is visible to both of you.

---

Features

• Secure two-person login — accounts are created with a private invite code, passwords are bcrypt-hashed, and access is via short-lived JWTs. The first account to register becomes the admin and approves later sign-ups. Both partners share the same calendar and entries, with roles controlling who can edit (admin/user) versus view only (read-only). As an admin you can also reset a forgotten password or delete an account (with confirmation) from the Admin page.

• Fast tracking — add a feed, sleep, or diaper in a couple of taps; edit or delete any entry from the day panel. Sleep entries can be left open ("still sleeping") and the summary counts them up to the present. Diaper entries include a stool-color scale (yellow, green, brown, and shades of each) alongside wet/dirty flags.

• 15-minute time increments — every entry's time picker only offers minutes that fall on the quarter hour (:00, :15, :30, :45), so times stay consistent and easy to read. The field layout (date + hour + minute) is fully responsive and works the same on iOS and desktop.

• Calendar view — month grid summarizing each day's feed count/volume, sleep total, and diaper count, with a detailed list for any day you tap.

  

• Entry form — one form for all three entry types with a note field on every entry.

  

• Statistics — interactive charts summarizing feeds, sleep, and diapers over 7/14/30/90-day windows with a date range picker.

  

• Admin page — manage the two-person account list: approve/deny pending sign-ups, switch roles between admin and read-only, reset passwords, or delete accounts.

  

• Dark mode — toggle in the top bar; your choice is remembered and the app follows your system preference on first visit.

• Responsive — the same UI adapts to desktop and mobile.

Architecture

Three containers orchestrated with Docker Compose:

Service	Tech	Port
db	PostgreSQL 16	5432
backend	Python (FastAPI + SQLAlchemy)	8000
frontend	React (Vite + TypeScript), served by nginx	8080

Each service has its own directory (backend/, frontend/, plus the db service defined inline in docker-compose.yml). The backend API is available directly at http://localhost:8000/api with Swagger docs at http://localhost:8000/docs. The frontend nginx container proxies /api/ requests to the backend and serves hashed static assets with long-lived cache headers (the HTML shell is never cached, so clients always pick up new bundles).

Configuration

Everything is configured through environment variables in .env (see .env.example). The critical ones for a real deployment are a strong JWT_SECRET and a private INVITE_CODE.

Data model

• users — you and your wife (email, name, bcrypt password hash).
• entries — a single flexible table for all tracking. Each entry has a type (feed, sleep, or diaper), a start/end time, an optional note, and a details JSON column that holds type-specific fields so new tracking types are trivial to add.

Development

Run the backend locally:

cd backend
python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
DATABASE_URL=postgresql+psycopg://baby:baby@localhost:5432/baby \
JWT_SECRET=dev INVITE_CODE=bumblebee uvicorn src.main:app --reload

Run the frontend locally (uses a dev proxy to http://localhost:8000):

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Database tables are managed with Alembic migrations and applied automatically on backend startup. To create a new migration after changing a model:

docker compose exec backend alembic revision --autogenerate -m "describe change"

Review the generated file in backend/alembic/versions/, then restart the backend (docker compose restart backend) to apply it. The schema is checked for drift with compare_type, so column type changes are picked up too.

The initial migration (0001_initial.py) is safe to apply on a database that was previously created by the old create_all startup — it skips tables that already exist.

Testing

Backend tests use pytest against a disposable Postgres database:

cd backend
python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
pytest

Frontend tests use Vitest and React Testing Library:

cd frontend
npm install
npm test

The GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs both suites on every push and pull request, then builds and pushes the backend and frontend container images to GitHub Container Registry.