Hi Dave, thanks for the kind words.
Your request is not too uncommon, but before I get into the details of things I just want to say that the way you’re trying to use ActivityWatch is not supported (although it is possible). There are several reasons for this, but the main reason is that to be production-ready it requires a lot of work on both security (necessary when exposing the server on a network) and privacy (required when personal data is stored by a 3rd party, GDPR and such), both of which we don’t have the interest or resources to work on.
If despite this warning you decide to go ahead and try to use ActivityWatch to monitor your coworkers, you should make sure you at least have some sort of secure transport so that you’re not sending unencrypted data across the internet or giving people outside your network access to the server. This can be done with SSH tunneling or with a corporate VPN (not the proxy kind, but the kind that lets you access an intranet from the outside), but if you don’t already have something like a corporate VPN set up this is probably too much of a hassle for you.
Has provided the Ipv4 of the server system in the aw-client config file, don’t know how to connect to that aw-server from client systems!
Is the server reachable on port 5600 from outside your network? If you can’t go to http://serverip:5600 from the outside (you might additionally need to set the cors_origins setting in the aw-server config for your browser to let you load the page) then you need to configure your network/router/firewall to allow that. Exactly how to do that is not something we can help you with.
Since all the above is a bit messy/involved and comes with a lot of risks, there’s an option that I’d recommend considering: ask your coworkers to install ActivityWatch locally and then have them submit exports on regular intervals. That way you can store them in a secure location, and then import them to your own ActivityWatch instance to inspect the activity just as if they were reporting directly to the server.
This is similar to the “Reporting” feature we’ve had in mind to satisfy business-users like you, but it might not be quite what you’re looking for (feedback wanted!):
If you appreciate the help, please consider supporting us financially. We know that businesses use ActivityWatch, but we don’t have much contact with them and none have yet to step up to help the project financially (which makes us less willing to support their use-cases over time).
You can find details on how to support the project at https://activitywatch.net/donate/