The cure for all your standup woes.

A highly customizable and automated way to keep track of daily standups in markdown files.

View on: Github | GitHub Pages | RubyGems

• About
• Installation
  • Via RubyGems
  • Manual Installation
• Usage
  • Example
  • Customization and Runtime Options
• API
  • Documentation
• Reporting Bugs and Requesting Features
• Self-Promotion

I've now been at two separate companies where we post our daily standups in a chat client, such as Slack, Mattermost, or Riot. Typing out my standup every day became tedious, as I'd have to look up what I did the day before, copy and paste yesterday's work into a new entry, and add today's tasks. This gem automates most of this process, along with providing means of opening the file in your editor, and displaying entries from the command line.

I wasn't sure that others would find this useful, but then the pandemic happened, which I assume made doing standups via chat much more common.

In a nutshell, calling standup from the command line will open a standup file for the current month in your preferred editor. If an entry for today is already present, no text will be generated. If an entry for today doesn't exist, one will be generated, and if a previous entry exists, it will be added to today's entry as your previous day's work. See example. There's also an API if you'd like to use this in your own code somehow.

Just install the gem!

gem install standup_md

If you don't have permission on your system to install ruby or gems, I recommend using rbenv, or you can try the manual methods below.

From your terminal, clone the repository where you want it. From there, you have a couple of installation options.

git clone https://github.com/evanthegrayt/standup_md.git
cd standup_md

# Use rake to build and install the gem.
rake install

# OR manually link the executable somewhere. If you use this method, you cannot
# move the repository after you link it!
ln -s $PWD/bin/standup /usr/local/bin/standup

Call the executable.

standup

This opens the current month's standup file. If an entry already exists for today, nothing is added. If no entry exists for today, the previous "Current" is placed in the "Previous" section of a new entry. The format of this file is very important; do not change anything, except for adding entries for today.

For example, if the standup entry from yesterday reads as follows:

# 2020-04-13
## Previous
- Did something else.
## Current
- Write new feature for `standup_md`
- Fix bug in `standup_md`
## Impediments
- None

The following scaffolding will be added for current entry at the top of the file:

# 2020-04-14
## Previous
- Write new feature for `standup_md`
- Fix bug in `standup_md`
## Current
- <!-- ADD TODAY'S WORK HERE -->
## Impediments
- None

There are also flags that will print entries to the command line. There's a full list of features below, but as a quick example, you can copy today's entry to your clipboard without even opening your editor.

standup -c | pbcopy

You can create a file in your home directory called ~/.standup_md.yml. Settings located in this file will override default behavior. This file can also have settings overwritten at runtime by the use of options. You can view my config file as an example. Any setting in this file can still be overridden at runtime by passing flags to the executable.

You'll notice, a lot of settings don't have the ability to be changed at runtime when calling the executable. This is because the file structure is very important, and changing values that affect formatting will cause problems with the file parser. If you don't want to use a default, make the change in your config file before you start editing standups. There is an open issue for handling this for the user, but they're not available yet.

There are no options to change the headers at runtime because it uses the headers to detect tasks from previous entries. If changed at runtime, this would cause errors. For this reason, if you don't like the default headers, change them in your configuration file after installation, and then try to not change them again.

# Key:                 Default
header_depth:          1
header_date_format:    '%Y-%m-%d'
sub_header_depth:      2
current_header:        'Current'
previous_header:       'Previous'
impediments_header:    'Impediments'
file_name_format:      '%Y_%m.md'
bullet_character:      '-'        # (dash)
directory:             '~/.cache/standup_md'
editor:                # $VISUAL, $EDITOR or vim, in that order
current_entry_tasks:
  - "<!-- ADD TODAY'S WORK HERE -->"
previous_entry_tasks:  # An array of the tasks from the previous entry
impediments:
  - 'None'
notes:                 null # If not null, must be array
sub_header_order:
  - 'previous'
  - 'current'
  - 'impediments'
  - 'notes'

The Standup Doctor
        --current-entry-tasks=ARRAY  List of current entry's tasks
        --previous-entry-tasks=ARRAY List of yesterday's tasks
        --impediments=ARRAY          List of impediments for current entry
        --notes=ARRAY                List of notes for current entry
        --sub-header-order=ARRAY     The order of the sub-headers when writing the file
        --[no-]append-previous       Append previous tasks? Default is true
    -f, --file-name-format=STRING    Date-formattable string to use for standup file name
    -e, --editor=EDITOR              Editor to use for opening standup files
    -d, --directory=DIRECTORY        The directories where standup files are located
        --[no-]write                 Write current entry if it doesn't exist. Default is true
        --[no-]edit                  Open the file in the editor. Default is true
    -j, --[no-]json                  Print output as formatted json. Default is false.
    -v, --[no-]verbose               Verbose output. Default is false.
    -c, --current                    Print current entry. Disables editing
    -a, --all                        Print all previous entries. Disables editing

Any options not set in this file will retain their default values. Note that if you change file_name_format, and don't use a month or year, there will only ever be one standup file. This could cause issues long-term, as the files will get large over time and possibly cause performance issues.

If you wanted to add some tasks at runtime, and without opening the file in an editor, you could use the following:

standup --no-edit --current-entry-tasks="Work on this thing","And another thing!"

Below are some quick examples, but the API is fully documented in the documentation.

This was mainly written as a command line utility, but I made the API available for scripting. There are attribute accessors for most of the settings in the customization table above. To view all available methods, read the comments in the source. A quick-and-dirty example of how to write a new entry via code could look like the following:

require 'standup_md'

standup = StandupMD.load(
  current_header: 'Today',
  current_entry_tasks: ['Thing to do today', 'Another thing to do today'],
  impediments: ['Not enough time in the day']
)

standup.write

Entries are just hashes, so you can easily transform them to json objects.

require 'standup_md'
require 'json'

standup = StandupMD.load
standup_entries_as_json = standup.all_entries.to_json

If you have an idea or find a bug, please create an issue. Just make sure the topic doesn't already exist. Better yet, you can always submit a Pull Request.

I do these projects for fun, and I enjoy knowing that they're helpful to people. Consider starring the repository if you like it! If you love it, follow me on Github!