Pet Tracker v4
Pet Tracker v4 helps pet owners keep an accurate record of what their pets eat, how they feel about it, and how healthy they are. Log each meal, see which foods your pet really loves, keep track of the food in the cupboard, prepare for vet visits, and every month get the current Taiwan prices for the kibbles your pet loves most. Family and pet sitters can help: caregivers record feeding, litter, water and medicine with one tap on the Today page, everyone sees it straight away, and reminders say when a job might be due.
Overview
Who it's for: people caring for cats (or other pets) who want more than memory and receipts: what was served, how much was left, how eagerly it was eaten, and how weight and blood results change over time. It works in English, 繁體中文 and 日本語.
How it fits together:
- Feeding is the heart of it. Each meal is a tracker: food type, brand, amount served and left, how hungry the pet was and how much it loved the food. From these the app scores every food, charts intake and weight over time, and keeps a Favorite Food list of the foods your pet loves most.
- Everything else builds on that record. Dry food bags are drawn down by each tracker, so the app knows how much is left and when it will run out. The favorite list decides which kibbles get a monthly price check. Health checks, weight and vet visits sit alongside, so a vet can see the whole picture.
- Looking after them together. Each owner has a household: their cats, food bags, litter boxes and water spots. They invite caregivers (who record care) and give viewers a personal read-only link. Taps on the Today page show up on everyone's page at once, and reminders (by the Android app, LINE or email) say when the litter box, water fountain or a dose is due.
- Sharing is opt-in. Owners can also create a read-only link to a pet's feeding dashboard (for a vet), or invite other members to a specific vet visit.
- It runs itself in the background. An hourly job sends care reminders; daily jobs send backups and weight reminders; a monthly job checks kibble prices and emails the results.
Under the hood: a server-rendered Rails 8.1 app (Hotwire: Turbo and Stimulus, Tailwind CSS). The same pages serve desktop and mobile browsers, an installable PWA, and an Android app (pet_tracker_android/, Hotwire Native). Background jobs, caching and real-time updates run on the database through Solid Queue, Solid Cache and Solid Cable, so no Redis is needed. Production runs on Railway with PostgreSQL and deploys every push to main. For the full design, see ARCHITECTURE.md.
Features
- Pet Management: Add and manage profiles for multiple pets.
- In-App Usage Guide: A step-by-step guide at
/doc (in English, 繁體中文 and 日本語) covering every feature below, with a table of contents.
- Households, Caregivers and Viewers: Invite caregivers by email to record care, give viewers a personal read-only link (no account needed), hand the household to someone else, and keep every household's cats apart.
- Today Page: One tap for 🍽 Fed, ⚖️ Weight, 💊 Meds, 🚽 Scooped / ♻️ Full change / 🧽 Box cleaned and 💧 Refilled / 🧽 Cleaned / 🔄 Filter changed, with Undo, quick time changes, details (food, litter observations), Delete for mistakes, and a timeline of the last 24 hours. Litter records can note pee clumps, poops, stool and anything unusual, shown in red and on the cat's trackers page for 30 days. Changes appear on everyone's page without reloading.
- Medications: Doses at set times or as needed; each dose shows due, given, couldn't give or overdue, with a double-dose check.
- Care Reminders: For each litter box and water spot job, every few hours or days, or at set times; overdue doses too. Sent by the Android app, LINE or email, once, with one follow-up.
- Dietary Tracking & Preference Analysis: Log daily feeding records and identify your pet's favorite foods using a scoring algorithm based on their hunger, how much they loved the food, how much they left and how often they came back to it.
- Kibble Price Check: On the 1st of every month, the app finds current Taiwan prices for the kibbles your pet has loved over the last 4 months, ranks them by price per kg, and emails you the list. See Kibble Price Check below.
- Smart Inventory Management: Track dry food bags with automatic calculation of the food left and a predicted run-out date based on how fast your pet eats; restock a bag when you open a new one.
- Comprehensive Data Visualization: Interactive charts of food consumption (dry and wet) and weight over time, including separate tracking for boarding stays (meals whose note says hotel, boarding or 旅館). Download or share a chart as an image.
- Health Record Management: Track your pet's checkups and blood test results.
- AI Data Extraction: Upload photos of health checkup reports and let Google Gemini fill in the results, using your own Gemini API key.
- Vet Visit Preparation & Q&A: Prepare questions before a vet visit and record the vet's answers afterward, with the vet's name, the purpose of the visit (vaccination, checkup, dental cleaning, surgery, and more), and how long you waited versus how long you spent with the vet.
Kibble Price Check
Pet Tracker compares what your pet's favorite kibbles cost in Taiwan's online shops, so you can buy the one your pet loves at the best price.
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Which kibbles: the ones on your pet's favorite list with a favorite score of 30 or more, fed in the last 4 months (up to 5).
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Where prices come from:
- BigGo (biggo.com.tw), a price-comparison site that lists many shops at once, including Shopee, momo, Yahoo, Coupang and Rakuten.
- PChome 24h's own search.
Other price-comparison sites such as feebee were ruled out because their terms forbid automated collection.
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Matching the right product: shops name products differently from owners (e.g. 室內貓雙響宴 vs 室內雙饗宴). The app compares names character by character, and also checks the brand (under any name you've used for it, e.g. 喵皇奴 / Purrsuit), the species, every protein you named (鴨肉 is never taken for 雞肉), product-line codes like IN27, and the exact variant a price is for.
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Fair comparison: each listing's bag size is read from its title (2kg, 300克, 3.3lb, 4kg 2包組…) and prices are ranked by NT$ per kg, cheapest first. Short-dated or repacked stock is left out.
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Where to see it: open a pet's profile → Kibble Prices, or the link on the favorite list. Refresh now checks again, once a day. On the 1st of each month the results are also emailed to you, in 繁體中文, 日本語 or English depending on your time zone.
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When nothing is found: if neither BigGo nor PChome lists a kibble, the page says "Can't find this kibble in shops right now."
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Being a good neighbor: each search is made at most once a month (shared across users), requests are spaced 2 seconds apart and one pet is checked at a time, and BigGo's redirect links, which its robots.txt disallows, are never fetched.
Prices are approximate. Pet Tracker doesn't sell anything and isn't paid by these shops. The design, decisions and test results are recorded in KIBBLE_PRICE_PLAN.md.
Scheduled Jobs
Defined in config/recurring.yml and run by Solid Queue in production (server time, UTC):
| Job | When | What it does |
|---|
CareReminderJob | Every hour at :05 | Sends due litter box and water spot jobs and overdue doses to owners and caregivers who turned reminders on (9am in their own time zone for daily jobs) |
UserBackupJob | Every day at 3am | Emails a CSV backup to users who changed a tracker in the last day |
pet_weight_reminder | Every day at 9am | Reminds owners to weigh their pets, by email or LINE |
purge_expired_sessions | Every day at 4am | Deletes expired sign-in sessions |
MonthlyKibblePriceJob | The 1st of every month at 6am | Checks kibble prices for every pet fed kibble in the last 30 days and emails the results |
clear_solid_queue_finished_jobs | Every hour | Clears finished background jobs |
Technical Highlights
- Rails 8.1 monolith with Hotwire (Turbo and Stimulus), Importmap and Tailwind CSS; the same views serve browsers, the PWA and the Hotwire Native Android app.
- Solid Queue, Solid Cache and Solid Cable for database-backed background jobs, caching and live updates (Turbo Streams page refreshes per household).
- Households and roles in one policy (
HouseholdPolicy), with the household always taken from the cat, box or spot, never from a form.
- Firebase Cloud Messaging (HTTP v1) for Android notifications, and Google/LINE/GitHub sign-in in the Android app through a Chrome Custom Tab and a one-time code.
- Gemini AI Integration for reading health-check reports, with each user's own API key.
- Price lookups with Nokogiri over a small, allow-listed HTTP client (only BigGo's and PChome's search pages; no redirects; size and time limits).
- Internationalization with
rails-i18n and i18n-js (translations shared with Stimulus controllers).
- Deployment: Railway in production (PostgreSQL, a web process and a
bin/jobs worker, see Procfile), with Thruster for HTTP caching and compression. A Kamal configuration is also included.
- Testing: Minitest unit, integration and browser (system) tests, plus Brakeman, RuboCop and importmap audits, all run by GitHub Actions on pull requests and pushes to
main.
Getting Started
You'll need Ruby 3.4.1 and Node.js (for Tailwind CSS and i18n-js). Development and tests use SQLite, so no database server is needed locally; production uses PostgreSQL.
- Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/yuhruh/Pet_Feeding_Tracker_v4.git
cd Pet_Feeding_Tracker_v4
- Install dependencies:
bundle install
npm install
- Create and set up the database:
bin/rails db:prepare
- Start the app (web server, Tailwind watcher, translation export and job worker, from
Procfile.dev):
bin/dev
- Run the tests:
bin/rails test # unit and integration tests
bin/rails test:system # browser tests (needs Chrome)
Sign-in with Google, LINE or GitHub needs their client IDs and secrets in the environment; email sign-in works without them. Android app notifications need the Firebase service account JSON in FIREBASE_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_JSON (on the web and worker services) and the project's google-services.json in pet_tracker_android/app/ (not committed); without them reminders go by LINE or email.
How to Use
- Create an account: Sign up, or sign in with Google, LINE or GitHub.
- Set your time zone in your profile so feeding times are recorded correctly.
- Add a pet in the "Pets" section.
- Log meals in "Trackers". Charts show intake and weight trends, and the Favorite Food list shows your pet's most loved foods.
- Check kibble prices: open your pet's profile → Kibble Prices to see where its favorite kibbles are cheapest per kg. Prices are checked on the 1st of every month and emailed to you; press Refresh now to check today.
- Manage food storage in "Dry Foods". The app predicts when each bag will run out based on current feeding.
- Track health in "Health Checks". Add your Gemini API key in your profile to have report photos read for you.
- Prepare for vet visits in "Vet Visits": note questions before the appointment, then record the answers, the vet, the purpose, and consultation and waiting times. Invite other members to help.
- Invite helpers on your household page: caregivers by email, viewers with a personal link. Set up your litter boxes and water spots, and how often each job is due.
- Look after them on Today: tap what you did; everyone sees it at once. Turn on 🔔 Reminders there to be told when something's due.
- Share records: create a link so others, like vets, can see your pet's feeding history.
For step-by-step instructions, open Docs in the app's menu (/doc) or see USAGE.md.
Documentation
| Where | What's in it |
|---|
/doc in the app (app/views/pages/doc.html.erb) | The usage guide for users, in all three languages. The account, pet, dry food, tracker and CSV import sections are written in the view; every other feature is a section under doc_page.feature_sections in config/locales/*.yml, so adding a feature to the guide means adding a section there in each language. |
| USAGE.md | The same usage guide as Markdown |
| ARCHITECTURE.md | How the app is built |
| HOUSEHOLDS_CAREGIVER_PLAN.md | Design and checkpoints for households, caregivers, the Today page and reminders |
| KIBBLE_PRICE_PLAN.md | Design, decisions and test results for the kibble price check |
Contributing
Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a pull request or open an issue.
License
This project is licensed under the MIT License.
