Strava Activity Downloader

This is a Rust server that downloads all Strava activities and the corresponding activity streams (tracks) for the authenticated user. The activities are stored in local a SQLite 3 database; the activity streams are written to GPX files.

The downloader respects the rate limits defined for your Strava API client. By default, the built-in scheduler issues a request every 10 seconds. The delay can be adapted in the server configuration. When the daily request limit is reached, the scheduler suspends. The downloading can be resumed later from point where it stopped. This also works after a server restart.

The server can be controlled by a React UI, which is also part of this project. It takes care of authenticating the application with Strava, lets you start and stop the downloading, and shows the download progress.

Preconditions

Required Tools

• Rust with cargo for the server.
• Node.js with npm for the UI.
• Optionally sqlite3 for querying the local DB.

Strava API Client

To connect to Strava, you need a Strava API client. If you don't have one already, you can register a new API client at https://www.strava.com/settings/api.

Make sure that the Authorization Callback Domain of your client is localhost:2525.

You will need values for Client ID and Client Secret of your API client for configuring the server (see below).

Setup

Build the Server

cargo build

Configure the Server

Create a server configuration from the template:

cp conf/application.yaml.example conf/application.yaml

Then edit conf/application.yaml and set the Client ID and Client Secret of your Strava API client:

oauth:
  client_id: "<your-strava-client-id>"
  client_secret: "<your-strava-client-secret>"

Build the Web UI

cd web
npm install
npm run build
cd ..

Running

Start the server:

RUST_LOG=info cargo run 

Then point your browser to http://localhost:2525 and start downloading your activities!

Dev Mode

It is also possible to run the web UI in vite's preview mode. The preview server runs at port 2020. To ensure that the Rust server redirects to the vite preview server after authenticating with Strava, the target_url configured in conf/application.yaml should be

oauth:
  target_url: "http://localhost:2020" # Redirect to after authentication

Then start the dev server in another shell (tab):

cd web
npm run dev

Point your browser to http://localhost:2020.

Server API

Instead of using the web UI, the server can be controlled via REST API. For usability, all endpoints use GET. A browser is only needed for the authorization, where Strava redirects to its login and authorization pages.

Authorize

GET /authorize

starts the authorization with Strava. Under the hood, the server performs an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Grant flow to obtain a Strava token. At the end of the process, the server redirects to the URL configured at oauth.target_url in conf/application.yaml. By default, this is the web UI exposed at the root path of the server.

Status

GET /status

opens an SSE channel that receives server-status updates as JSON objects in the SSE data field. An example object is

{
  "authorized": true,
  "download_state": "Inactive",
  "activity_stats": {
    "act_count": 1191,
    "act_min_time": "2010-04-01T15:13:08Z",
    "act_max_time": "2024-03-10T10:16:17Z",
    "trk_count": 380,
    "trk_max_time": "2016-10-03T14:00:56Z"
  }
}

Toggle

GET /toggle

starts the download process or stops it, depending on the previous state. The request returns the name of the new state (e.g. "Inactive").

Using the Data

The server stores the GPX files in the data folder, grouped by year and month. The file names refer to the activity ids provided by Strava. An example path is

./data/2024/03/7654321123.gpx

To read the GPX files from oldes to newest, you can either sort the files by name (as Strava uses increasing activity ids), or by file data (because the server downloads the files in chronological order).

If you have sqlite3 installed, you can also query the activity database (activity.db). This example query selects all activities of 2024:

sqlite3 activity.db "select * from activity where substr(start_date, 1, 4) = '2024'"

The id column is the primary key and holds the activity id. Column gpx_fetched shows the GPX download status: 0 means: "not yet downloaded", 1 means "GPX downloaded" (there is a corresponding file in folder data), and 2 means "the activity does not have a track".

Note that you can reveal the column names and format the results like so:

sqlite3 activity.db -header -column "select * from activity"