Baby Tracker

A self-hosted PWA two caregivers use from their phones to track one baby, from the newborn weeks (feeds, diapers, sleep, a push nudge when nothing has been logged) through the first two years (growth percentiles, a photo gallery, CDC milestone and vaccination checklists).

One Node.js process serves the app, owns a SQLite database, stores photos on disk, and runs the notification timers. No accounts, no analytics, no third-party services unless you opt into the AI extras below.

Who it is for: technical parents who can run a Docker image or a Fly app and want their child's data on a machine they control. It is deliberately single-family: two named caregivers, one baby, one shared secret.

Not goals: accounts or multi-family hosting, a native app, non-US immunization or milestone schedules (the checklists are CDC/ACIP data files and can be swapped), and translated UI. Issues asking for these will be closed with a pointer here; forks are welcome.

Features

• Home - baby's age, latest weight and percentile, milestone progress, and quick access to everything else. A classic Log-first layout is one toggle away for the newborn phase.
• Logging - breastfeeding, bottle (formula or expressed milk, in mL), pumping, diapers, weight, height, head circumference, milestones, vaccinations and photos. Diapers save in one tap; the bottle sheet pre-fills from the last bottle. Every timestamp is editable.
• Growth - weight, height and head-circumference charts plotted against the WHO 0-24 month standards (the ones US pediatricians use under age 2), with percentiles computed from the LMS tables for the baby's sex.
• Checklists - the CDC "Learn the Signs. Act Early." milestone list, bracketed by age off the birth date, and the CDC/ACIP immunization schedule with due and overdue badges. Tapping an item opens a pre-filled sheet; saving it records the milestone or shot as an event in the timeline.
• Photos - a gallery grouped by baby-month with monthly-birthday badges, thumbnails generated on demand, and push nudges (on by default, each with its own off switch, daytime only) when the gallery goes stale or a month-iversary arrives.
• Timeline and Reports - reverse-chronological entries filterable by type; daily feeding, diaper, pumping and appetite charts; an inferred sleep-cycle view built from the gaps between feeds.
• Push notifications - a feed nudge after N quiet hours (on by default at 6h; set NUDGE_HOURS=0 to switch it off once the newborn phase passes) plus the photo nudges above. Web Push, no vendor account needed.
• Voice logging (optional) - an in-app microphone button and a Siri Shortcut, both parsed by Claude, in English or Mandarin.
• Backups - a one-request tar.gz export of the database and photos.

Try it

A read-only demo runs at https://baby-tracker-demo.fly.dev (log in with the secret demo as either Alex or Sam). Everything in it is synthetic and regenerated on each deploy; logging, uploads and export are disabled there.

Screenshots

All screenshots are anonymized. Every name, date, measurement and photo shown is synthetic: they come from a throwaway database seeded by scripts/seed-demo-data.js plus placeholder images, never from a real family's data. See Demo data.

Privacy

This repo is public; no personal data lives in it. Names, emails, and the shared login secret are supplied via environment variables (.env locally - gitignored - or Fly secrets in production). The database and photos live on a private volume, and photos are only served behind login.

Local development

npm install
cp .env.example .env # optional - every key has a usable dev default
npm start            # http://localhost:3000
npm test             # API test suite, no config needed

A fresh clone boots with no other setup: the data directory and push keys are created on first start, and the startup banner lists which optional features are on. (npm run make-icons only regenerates the committed app icon.)

Configuration is read from .env; .env.example documents every key, and the table at the bottom of this file has the full reference. The default login secret in dev is baby.

Continuous integration

Every pull request runs npm test (GitHub Actions, Node 22) and gets one automated comment from Claude listing any README, CLAUDE.md, .env.example, fly.toml.example or docs/ statement the change made stale. The comment job is read-only and never pushes. Neither job runs on draft PRs or on PRs from forks; fork contributors should run npm test locally. Tagging v* publishes the container image to GitHub Container Registry (.github/workflows/publish-image.yml).

Demo data (for screenshots)

The screenshots above were produced from a disposable instance with an entirely synthetic database - no real data is involved at any point:

SCRATCH=/tmp/bt-demo && mkdir -p $SCRATCH
cat > $SCRATCH/demo.env <<EOF
USER_NAMES=Alex,Sam
BABY_NAME=Robin
BIRTH_DATE=2026-05-02
BABY_SEX=girl
APP_SECRET=demo
DATA_DIR=$SCRATCH/demo-data
PORT=3100
EOF
SEED_DIR=$SCRATCH/demo-data SEED_BIRTH=2026-05-02 \
  SEED_NOW=2026-07-23T15:40:00-07:00 node scripts/seed-demo-data.js
node --env-file=$SCRATCH/demo.env server/index.js   # http://localhost:3100

scripts/seed-demo-data.js generates about two months of plausible feeds, diapers, weekly growth measurements and milestones from a seeded PRNG, so re-running it reproduces the same screenshots. It refuses to write to a live DATA_DIR, and --env-file= (rather than npm start) keeps your real .env out of the demo process.

Deploying anywhere (Docker)

A prebuilt multi-arch image is published to GitHub Container Registry on every release, so a Raspberry Pi, a home server or any VPS with Docker can run the app without compiling anything.

git clone https://github.com/magratheazaphod/baby-tracker && cd baby-tracker
# (or just download docker-compose.yml and .env.example into an empty folder)
cp .env.example .env   # set APP_SECRET, USER_NAMES, BABY_NAME, BIRTH_DATE,
                       # BABY_SEX and HOME_TZ at minimum
docker compose up -d
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:3000/api/health   # {"ok":true}

The app binds to localhost only, because the "Add to Home Screen" install flow and Web Push notifications both require HTTPS. Put a reverse proxy with automatic certificates in front of it. A ready-made Caddy setup is included: point DNS at the host, replace tracker.example.com in deploy/caddy/Caddyfile, then

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.caddy.yml up -d

Traefik, nginx or a Cloudflare tunnel work just as well; proxy to port 3000.

Then on each phone: open the app URL in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen → open it from the home screen → log in → tap 🔔 to enable nudges.

The named data volume holds the SQLite database and every photo. Back it up the same way as any other install: GET /api/export or scripts/backup.sh (see Backups). To upgrade, docker compose pull && docker compose up -d; schema migrations run automatically at startup.

Deploying to Fly.io

cp fly.toml.example fly.toml           # set your app name + region (stays local)
fly apps create your-app-name
fly volumes create data --size 1 --region <region> -a your-app-name
npx web-push generate-vapid-keys       # for push notifications
fly secrets set -a your-app-name \
  APP_SECRET="your-family-secret" \
  USER_NAMES="Mom,Dad" \
  BABY_NAME="..." \
  BIRTH_DATE="YYYY-MM-DD" \
  BABY_SEX="girl" \
  VAPID_SUBJECT="mailto:[email protected]" \
  VAPID_PUBLIC_KEY="..." \
  VAPID_PRIVATE_KEY="..."
fly deploy --ha=false

Then on each iPhone: open the app URL in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen → open it from the home screen → log in → tap 🔔 to enable nudges.

Monitoring

GET /api/health returns {"ok":true} when the app is up and its database is readable, and 503 otherwise. It runs a one-row SQLite query rather than just confirming the process is alive - a machine whose volume failed to mount will happily serve pages while every real request fails. It requires no login and returns nothing personal, so it is safe to point a public monitor at.

Two things should watch it:

1. Fly - fly.toml.example includes an [[http_service.checks]] block that polls it every 30s and restarts the machine when it fails.
2. An external uptime monitor - UptimeRobot or Healthchecks.io, free tier, pointed at https://your-app.fly.dev/api/health. This is the one that actually reaches you: if the machine or the whole region is down, Fly's internal check has no way to send you an alert.

curl -s https://your-app.fly.dev/api/health   # {"ok":true}

Backups

Three layers:

1. Fly volume snapshots - automatic, daily, 30-day retention (fly volumes update <vol-id> --snapshot-retention 30). Restore with fly volumes create data --snapshot-id <id>.
2. Off-site export - GET /api/export streams a tar.gz of the SQLite database + all photos. Authenticated by login cookie or Authorization: Bearer <APP_SECRET>.
3. Pull script - scripts/backup.sh downloads an export and keeps the newest 30 locally:

   APP_URL=https://your-app.fly.dev APP_SECRET=... ./scripts/backup.sh
   

   Run it on a schedule (cron/launchd) for continuous off-site copies.

Voice logging (optional)

Two ways to log by voice, both parsed by Claude and both off unless you set the keys:

• In-app microphone button - needs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY plus TRANSCRIBE_API_KEY for speech-to-text (any OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/transcriptions endpoint; Groq by default). The button appears as soon as the transcription key is set, so set both or every attempt fails. Handles English, Mandarin, and sentences that switch between them.
• Siri Shortcut - POST /api/voice takes a dictated sentence, saves the events, and returns a spoken confirmation, so "Hey Siri, Log Baby" works hands-free. Needs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY plus its own VOICE_TOKEN (fly secrets set -a your-app-name --stage VOICE_TOKEN="...", then deploy). The token is deliberately separate from APP_SECRET and can only create events, never read or export.

See docs/siri-voice-logging.md for both.

Environment variables

Var	Default	Purpose
APP_SECRET	baby (dev only)	shared login secret - set a real one in prod
USER_NAMES	Mom,Dad	comma-separated parent names shown at login
BABY_NAME	Baby	baby's name (private, env-only)
APP_NAME	falls back to BABY_NAME	app title + home-screen name
BIRTH_DATE	unset	baby's birth date (YYYY-MM-DD); enables growth percentiles
BABY_SEX	unset	boy or girl; selects the WHO growth-standards table
HOME_TZ	America/Los_Angeles	day boundaries for reports
NUDGE_HOURS	6	push a nudge after this many hours with no entries; 0 disables
RENUDGE_MINUTES	60	re-nudge interval while still quiet
PHOTO_NUDGE_DAYS	3	nudge for a photo after this many days with none; 0 disables
MONTHLY_PHOTO_NUDGE	1	monthly-birthday photo nudge (needs BIRTH_DATE); 0 disables
PORT	3000	port the server listens on
DATA_DIR	./data	where SQLite + photos live (/data on Fly)
VAPID_PUBLIC_KEY / VAPID_PRIVATE_KEY / VAPID_SUBJECT	auto-generated, persisted in DATA_DIR	web-push credentials; set only to survive a data wipe
COOKIE_SECRET	derived from APP_SECRET	cookie signing key
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

License

MIT - see LICENSE. The WHO growth standards, CDC milestone checklist and CDC/ACIP immunization schedule bundled under public/ are public reference data from their respective publishers, not covered by this license. Screenshots under docs/screenshots/ are synthetic demo captures and may be reused under the same MIT terms.