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Welcome!

If you are here, it means you are interested in helping this small project out. A hearty welcome and thank you! There are many ways you can contribute:

  • Offer PR's to fix bugs or implement new features.
  • Give feedback and bug reports regarding the software or the documentation.
  • Setting up an automated toolchain with mock endpoints for the HTTP calls for easier testing
  • Improve our examples, tutorials, and documentation.

Python Versions

Python 2 vs 3

At the time of this writing (2021-07) Python 2 has long passed its sunset. And the effort to still support Python 2 has become too big (see #64); the script now uses features from Python 3 which Python 2 doesn't understand, so if you try to run the script with Python 2 you will get complaints about invalid syntax or other similar error messages.

Python 3.x Versions

The script should be usable for a wide range of users and Python versions.

For that reason the script should be compatible with the oldest still supported Python version. At the time of this writing (July 2023) this is Python 3.8, whose end-of-life is currently scheduled for October 2024.

The Github Actions (see github/workflows/python-app.yml) thus run all steps twice, once with the oldest supported Python version, and once with the newest released version.

Updating the minimum Python version

  • bump at least the minor version in gcexport.py : SCRIPT_VERSION
  • gcexport.py : MINIMUM_PYTHON_VERSION
  • .github/workflows/python-app.yml : jobs.build.strategy.matrix.version
  • the paragraph just above
  • README.md : near the top
  • CHANGELOG.md : mention it

Getting started

Pull requests

If you are new to GitHub here is a detailed help source on getting involved with development on GitHub.

Testing

There is a small set of unit test, using pytest; these tests are executed automatically whenever a commit is pushed or when a pull request is updated.

I found that the free PyCharm Community is well suited for running the tests.

Unfortunately there are no mocks yet for simulating Garmin Connect during development, so for real tests you'll have to run the script against your own Garmin account.

REST endpoints

As this script doesn't use the paid API, the endpoints to use are known by reverse engineering browser sessions. And as the Garmin Connect website changes over time, chances are that this script gets broken.

Small history of the endpoints used by gcexport.py to get a list of activities:

  • activity-search-service-1.0: initial endpoint used since 2015, worked at least until January 2018
  • activity-search-service-1.2: endpoint introduced in gcexport.py in August 2016. In March 2018 this still works, but doesn't allow you to fetch more than 20 activities, even split over multiple calls (when doing three consecutive calls with 1,19,19 as limit parameter, the third one fails with HTTP error 500). In August 2018 it stopped working altogether. The JSON returned by this endpoint however was quite rich (see example activity-search-service-1.2.json in the json folder).
  • Profile page and User Stats page were introduced in August 2018 when activity-search-service-1.2 stopped working. Their purpose in this script is solely to get the number of activities which I didn't find elsewhere.
  • activitylist-service: endpoint introduced in gcexport.py in March 2018. The JSON returned by this endpoint is very different from the activity-search-service-1.2 one (also here see the example in the json folder), e.g.
    • it is concise and offers no redundant information (e.g. only speed, not speed and pace)
    • the units are not explicitly given and must be deducted (e.g. the speed unit is m/s)
    • there is less information, e.g. there is only one set of elevation values (not both corrected and uncorrected), and other values like minimum heart rate are missing.
    • some other information is available only as an ID (e.g. timeZoneId or deviceId), and more complete information is available by further REST calls (one for each activity and additional ones for device information)

Endpoints to get information about a specific activity:

  • activity-service: A kind of summary of the activity, most values are present in their canonical format.
  • activity-service-1.3 details: A detailed list of measurements, with a list of the metrics available for each measurement.

Limitations of Data Provided by Current Endpoints and Choices Made

  • The timezones provided are just the names (e.g. for Central European Time CET you can get either "Europe/Paris" or "(GMT+01:00) Central European Time"), but not the exact offset. Note that the "GMT+01:00" part of the name is hardcoded, so in summer (daylight savings time) Garmin Connect still uses +01:00 in the name even if the offset then is +02:00. To get the offset you need to calculate the difference between the startTimeLocal and the startTimeGMT.

Adapting to changes in Garmin Connect

Unknown parentType xxx

Manually get hold of the content of https://connect.garmin.com/activity-service/activity/activityTypes, e.g. when logged into Garmin Connect in the browser, using the browser's developer tools. There is an example file (from July 2023) in /json/activityTypes.json.

Find in this file the new parentType and add it to the definition of PARENT_TYPE_ID in gcexport.py