Putting My ❤️ Rate in My Terminal Prompt

My terminal prompt now starts like this:

That little heart is my latest Apple Health heart rate reading.

This is not a product. It is not a polished app. It is a tiny local bridge between my iPhone and my shell prompt, held together by an iPhone Shortcut, a small Python HTTP server, and a JSON file.

Flow

The whole thing is intentionally boring:

1iPhone Shortcut
2    ↓ POST JSON
3local Python server
4    ↓ writes latest-health.json
5prompt helper
6    ↓ reads JSON
7zsh prompt

The iPhone reads the latest heart rate sample from Apple Health and posts it to a server running on my laptop. The server stores only the latest reading. The shell prompt does not call the server at all. It just reads the local cache file and prints a compact prompt segment.

THe phone POSTs below payload to my server

1{
2  "heart_rate": 82,
3  "unit": "bpm",
4  "sent_at": "2026-06-28T14:30:00+05:30",
5  "device": "iphone"
6}

Why This Was Worth Building

I had fun making it , Not everything needs to be a product. Sometimes you can just piece up small things to make something useful for yourself. Build for yourself first !