Projects

Projects are used to track time for different things. A freelancer might have a project for every client they work on, while a student might have a project for each class they are taking.

You always have to specify a project when creating an entry. You can then filter reports by project with the --project option.

To view all of the active projects use the project:list command.

A project can be renamed using the project:rename command. The rename command takes two arguments: the old name and the new name.

$ php hours project:rename blarg blog
Project renamed.

A project can be deleted using the project:forget command. Deleting a project will delete all of it’s frames.

Default Projects

If you’re only using Hours to track time for a single project, you can set a default. The default project will be used if you don’t specify the project argument. To specify a default project you may set the default_project setting.

A common workflow is to track time for a given project when you’re in that project’s directory. For example, while working on the Hours codebase I’m working from the ~/code/hours directory on my computer.

To specify the default project for a directory you can add a .hours file. The .hours file is a file containing environment variables for the Hours CLI. To specify the default project, set the HOURS_PROJECT environment variable to the project’s name. A .hours file for a project named ‘blog’ would look like this:

HOURS_PROJECT=blog