stapelberg / fitbit-backup

Simple Go program to download your weight data from fitbit

fitbit-backup

fitbit-backup retrieves weight data from fitbit. So, if you have a WiFi scale like the Fitbit Aria, you can make a backup of the weight data that Fitbit stores for you. Of course, this tool is not restricted to just the Fitbit Aria — the data of any product which uses Fitbit to store weight data will be retrieved.

Installation

To download and compile, use:

go get -u github.com/stapelberg/fitbit-backup

Afterwards, run $GOPATH/bin/fitbit-backup to make sure it works (see below for configuration). Once you get it to spit out weight data, install a cronjob:

0 19 * * * /home/michael/gocode/bin/fitbit-backup -oauth2_cache_path=/home/michael/.fitbit-backup.token.json > ~/weight/fitbit-backup-$(date +'\%Y-\%m-\%d')

This cronjob will download weight data from Fitbit once a day and store it in a separate file. That way, even if one download fails, you will not accidentally overwrite your old backups, and you can even notice when Fitbit loses some data for whichever reason (hasn’t happened yet for me, but who knows…).

Configuration

In order to talk to fitbit, you first need to create an application. Go to https://dev.fitbit.com/apps/new and fill in the form like in this example:

Afterwards, fitbit will present you the “Client (Consumer) Secret” for the newly created application. Specify that using the flag -oauth2_client_secret.

When running fitbit-backup, it will prompt you to visit a URL in your browser in order to authorize the application to access your personal Fitbit account. Point the flag -oauth2_cache_path to a writable file and fitbit-backup will store the OAuth2 token in there. If you run fitbit-backup before the token expires, it will be automatically renewed. Ideally, you only have to visit the authorization URL in your browser once.

That’s it — now, when running fitbit-backup with all required flags, you should get an output like this:

2013-07-30 18:00 65.9
2013-07-30 23:59 65.3
…