Baby Buddy

Baby Buddy is a self‑hosted, web‑based application designed to help caregivers log and analyze infant activities such as sleep, feeding, diaper changes, and tummy time. From a developer’s standpoint it is a well‑structured Django project that exposes both a rich front‑end and a RESTful API for integration with third‑party services. The codebase follows industry best practices: Python 3, Django 4.x, and a PostgreSQL back‑end, while the UI is built with React (via Django’s django-webpack-loader) and styled using Tailwind CSS. This combination gives developers a familiar stack with strong typing, ORM abstractions, and modern component‑based front‑end tooling.

Technical Stack

Core Capabilities

• Event Logging – Users can create time‑stamped records for sleep, feeds, diapers, and more. Each event type is a Django model with validation rules.
• Analytics & Forecasting – Aggregated views and simple statistical models are exposed through DRF endpoints (/api/v1/stats/). Developers can consume these for custom dashboards.
• Internationalization – Built‑in django-rosetta support allows developers to add new locales or adjust translations without touching code.
• Webhook System – External services can subscribe to event changes via webhooks defined in the admin panel. Payloads are JSON and can be filtered by event type.
• OAuth2 / API Tokens – DRF’s token authentication can be replaced with OAuth2 (via django-oauth-toolkit) for tighter integration.

Deployment & Infrastructure

Baby Buddy is intentionally lightweight; a single Docker container hosts the Django app while another runs PostgreSQL. The official docker-compose.yml includes optional services such as Redis for caching and Celery workers for background tasks (e.g., email reminders). For production, the recommended stack is:

1. Reverse Proxy – Nginx or Traefik with TLS termination.
2. Database – Managed PostgreSQL (e.g., AWS RDS) with SSL enabled.
3. Scaling – Horizontal scaling of the Django container behind a load balancer; Celery workers can be scaled independently.
4. Backup – PostgreSQL dumps via pg_dump scheduled with cron or managed by the cloud provider.

Because it is open‑source under BSD‑2, there are no licensing constraints for private or commercial deployments.

Integration & Extensibility

• Plugins – The project ships a simple plugin registry (babybuddy.plugins) that allows third‑party packages to hook into signals, add admin panels, or extend the API. This is ideal for Home Assistant integrations or custom reporting tools.
• Webhooks & Callbacks – Each event emits a Django signal (post_save), which can trigger webhooks or internal processes.
• SDKs – While no official SDK exists, the REST API follows standard JSON conventions, making it trivial to write clients in any language.
• Custom Data Fields – The Event model supports a JSON field (extra_data) for arbitrary metadata, enabling developers to store sensor readings or device IDs without schema migrations.

Developer Experience

• Documentation – The public docs (https://docs.baby-buddy.net) cover API usage, deployment steps, and contribution guidelines. Inline code comments are plentiful, and the repository follows PEP‑8 with black formatting.
• Community – Active Gitter and GitHub Discussions channels provide quick support. The CI pipeline guarantees that pull requests are lint‑clean and well‑tested.
• Testing – The test suite covers 90%+ of the codebase; developers can run pytest locally and see coverage reports instantly.
• Extensible Auth – Switching from session auth to JWT or OAuth2 is straightforward thanks to DRF’s pluggable authentication classes.

Use Cases