apple-health-to-sqlite

Your iPhone and Apple Watch have been taking notes for years: every step, every heartbeat they sampled, every night's sleep stages, every workout with its GPS route. The Health app shows you that a day at a time. This tool turns the whole export into one SQLite database, so you can ask it anything — and, with Datasette, browse it as a website on your own machine.

uvx apple-health-to-sqlite import Export.zip mine/

That is the whole setup, given uv. The tool has no runtime dependencies, so nothing else gets installed, and it stays light even on an export of several gigabytes.

What you can ask it

Datasette opens with nineteen ready-made questions, one click each:

• How many steps per day — with 7- and 28-day averages, by weekday, by week?
• How long did I sleep each night, when did I go to bed, and how did that night show up in the next day's resting heart rate and HRV?
• Which workouts did I do, how much of them was moving rather than standing around, and where did the routes go? (on a map)
• How often did I close my activity rings?
• What is actually in my export — which metrics, from which device, since when, and where are the gaps?

And because it is plain SQLite, anything else is one query away:

select local_date, coalesce(deduplicated_value, day_value) as steps
from daily_metrics
where type_short = 'StepCount'
order by local_date desc

Try it in a minute, without your own data

The project can invent a realistic export — steps, heart rate, sleep stages, workouts with routes — so you can look around before touching your own:

uvx apple-health-to-sqlite synthesize --days 120 export.zip
uvx apple-health-to-sqlite import export.zip sample/
uvx "datasette<1" sample/

Then open http://localhost:8001.

Use it on your own export

1. On the iPhone: Health → your profile picture → Export All Health Data, and get the Export.zip onto your computer.

2. Import it and open it:

   uvx apple-health-to-sqlite import Export.zip mine/
   uvx "datasette<1" mine/
   

The directory holds the database and Datasette's configuration, so that is all Datasette needs to be told. A new export a few months later goes into the same directory: re-importing is safe, rows you already have are skipped and new ones are added.

To keep the command around instead of going through uvx each time:

uv tool install apple-health-to-sqlite
apple-health-to-sqlite import Export.zip mine/

Why this one

• Flat memory. The import streams. A five-year export with two million records imports in under a minute on a recent Mac and never needs more than about 55 MB.
• Nothing silently dropped. Anything the importer does not recognise — a new element in a future iOS — is kept verbatim and reported at the end.
• Numbers that match the Health app. When iPhone and Watch both count your steps, you get one day's steps, not twice as many.
• Calendar days in your time zone. A night's sleep is not split at midnight UTC.
• Built on Apple's own schema, which ships inside every export, and checks yours against it.

Your data stays yours

Everything runs locally; nothing is uploaded anywhere. Please keep it that way: do not datasette publish this database, and never attach your export or database to an issue — uvx apple-health-to-sqlite schema-diff Export.zip prints only the structure of your export and is safe to share.

Documentation

• Commands — every command and option
• Database layout — the tables, and what their numbers mean
• Datasette — opening the database, settings, plugins
• The export format — Apple's schema and its traps
• Performance — import and query timings

Requires uv, which fetches Python 3.11 or newer if you do not have it, and an export of HealthKit version 14 or newer (roughly iOS 16 onwards). Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Licence

MIT.