Getting Started

Requirements

Note: Alternatively, biweeklybudget is also distributed as a Docker container. Using the dockerized version will eliminate all of these dependencies aside from MySQL and Vault (the latter only if you choose to take advantage of the OFX downloading), both of which you can also run in containers.

  • Python 2.7 or 3.4+ (currently tested with 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 and developed with 3.6)
  • Python VirtualEnv and pip (recommended installation method; your OS/distribution should have packages for these)
  • MySQL, or a compatible database (e.g. MariaDB ). biweeklybudget uses SQLAlchemy for database abstraction, but currently specifies some MySQL-specific options, and is only tested with MySQL.
  • To use the automated OFX transaction downloading functionality:
    • A running, reachable instance of Hashicorp Vault with your financial institution web credentials stored in it.
    • If your bank does not support OFX remote access (“Direct Connect”), you will need to write a custom screen-scraper class using Selenium and a browser.

Installation

It’s recommended that you install into a virtual environment (virtualenv / venv). See the virtualenv usage documentation for information on how to create a venv.

This app is developed against Python 3.6, but should work back to 2.7. It does not support Python3 < 3.4.

mkdir biweeklybudget
virtualenv --python=python3.6 .
source bin/activate
pip install biweeklybudget

Important Note: Anyone who’s using this project for actual data should install from the package on PyPI. While the master branch of the git repository is always in a runnable state, there is no guarantee that data will be not be harmed by upgrading directly to master. Specifically, database migrations are only compatible between released versions; master is considered a pre-release/development version, and can have migrations removed or altered in breaking ways between official releases.

Upgrading

Documentation for upgrades depends on how you’ve installed and run biweeklybudget:

In all cases, you should always perform a full backup of your database before an upgrade.

Configuration

biweeklybudget can take its configuration settings via either constants defined in a Python module or environment variables. Configuration in environment variables always overrides configuration from the settings module.

Settings Module

biweeklybudget.settings imports all globals/constants from a module defined in the SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable. The recommended way to configure this is to create your own separate Python package for customization (either in a private git repository, or just in a directory on your computer) and install this package into the same virtualenv as biweeklybudget. You then set the SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to the Python module/import path of this module (i.e. the dotted path, like packagename.modulename).

Once you’ve created the customization package, you can install it in the virtualenv with pip install -e <git URL> (if it is kept in a git repository) or pip install -e <local path>.

This customization package can also be used for Loading Data during development, or implementing Custom OFX Downloading via Selenium. It is the recommended configuration method if you need to include more logic than simply defining static configuration settings.

Environment Variables

Every configuration setting can also be specified by setting an environment variable with the same name; these will override any settings defined in a SETTINGS_MODULE, if specified. Note that some environment variables require specific formatting of their values; see the settings module documentation for a list of these variables and the required formats.

Running Locally

Setup

source bin/activate
export SETTINGS_MODULE=<settings module>

It’s recommended that you create an alias to do this for you. Alternatively, instead of setting SETTINGS_MODULE, you can export the required environment variables (see above).

Flask

For information on the Flask application and on running the Flask development server, see Flask App.

Running In Docker

Biweeklybudget is also distributed as a docker image, to make it easier to run without installing as many Requirements.

You can pull the latest version of the image with docker pull jantman/biweeklybudget:latest, or a specific release version X.Y.Z with docker pull jantman/biweeklybudget:X.Y.Z. It is recommended that you run a specific version number, and that you make sure to perform a database backup before upgrading.

The only dependencies for a Docker installation are:

  • MySQL, which can be run via Docker (MariaDB official image recommended) or local on the host
  • Vault, if you wish to use the OFX downloading feature, which can also be run via Docker

Important Note: If you run MySQL and/or Vault in containers, please make sure that their data is backed up and will not be removed.

The image runs with the tini init wrapper and uses gunicorn under Python 3.6 to serve the web UI, exposed on port 80. Note that, while it runs with 4 worker threads, there is no HTTP proxy in front of Gunicorn and this image is intended for local network use by a single user/client. The image also automatically runs database migrations in a safe manner at start, before starting the Flask application.

For ease of running, the image defaults the SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to biweeklybudget.settings_example. This allows leveraging the environment variable configuration overrides so that you need only specify configuration options that you want to override from settings_example.py.

For ease of running, it’s highly recommended that you put your configuration in a Docker-readable environment variables file.

Environment Variable File

In the following examples, we reference the following environment variable file. It will override settings from settings_example.py as needed; specifically, we need to override the database connection string, pay period start date and reconcile begin date. In the examples below, we would save this as biweeklybudget.env:

DB_CONNSTRING=mysql+pymysql://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DBNAME?charset=utf8mb4
PAY_PERIOD_START_DATE=2017-03-28
RECONCILE_BEGIN_DATE=2017-02-15

Containerized MySQL Example

This assumes that you already have a MySQL database container running with the container name “mysql” and exposing port 3306, and that we want the biweeklybudget web UI served on host port 8080:

In our biweeklybudget.env, we would specify the database connection string for the “mysql” container:

DB_CONNSTRING=mysql+pymysql://USERNAME:PASSWORD@mysql:3306/DBNAME?charset=utf8mb4

And then run biweeklybudget:

docker run --name biweeklybudget --env-file biweeklybudget.env \
-p 8080:80 --link mysql jantman/biweeklybudget:latest

Host-Local MySQL Example

It is also possible to use a MySQL server on the physical (Docker) host system. To do so, you’ll need to know the host system’s IP address. On Linux when using the default “bridge” Docker networking mode, this will coorespond to a docker0 interface on the host system. The Docker documentation on adding entries to the Container’s hosts file provides a helpful snippet for this (on my systems, this results in 172.17.0.1):

ip -4 addr show scope global dev docker0 | grep inet | awk '{print $2}' | cut -d / -f 1

In our biweeklybudget.env, we would specify the database connection string that uses the “dockerhost” hosts file entry, created by the --add-host option:

# "dockerhost" is added to /etc/hosts via the `--add-host` docker run option
DB_CONNSTRING=mysql+pymysql://USERNAME:PASSWORD@dockerhost:3306/DBNAME?charset=utf8mb4

So using that, we could run biweeklybudget listening on port 8080 and using our host’s MySQL server (on port 3306):

docker run --name biweeklybudget --env-file biweeklybudget.env \
--add-host="dockerhost:$(ip -4 addr show scope global dev docker0 | grep inet | awk '{print $2}' | cut -d / -f 1)" \
-p 8080:80 jantman/biweeklybudget:latest

You may need to adjust those commands depending on your operating system, Docker networking mode, and MySQL server.

Settings Module Example

If you need to provide biweeklybudget with more complicated configuration, this is still possible via a Python settings module. The easiest way to inject one into the Docker image is to mount a python module directly into the biweeklybudget package directory. Assuming you have a custom settings module on your local machine at /opt/biweeklybudget-settings.py, you would run the container as shown below to mount the custom settings module into the container and use it. Note that this example assumes using MySQL in another container; adjust as necessary if you are using MySQL running on the Docker host:

docker run --name biweeklybudget -e SETTINGS_MODULE=biweeklybudget.mysettings \
-v /opt/biweeklybudget-settings.py:/app/lib/python3.6/site-packages/biweeklybudget/mysettings.py \
-p 8080:80 --link mysql jantman/biweeklybudget:latest

Note on Locales

biweeklybudget uses Python’s locale module to format currency. This requires an appropriate locale installed on the system. The docker image distributed for this package only includes the en_US.UTF-8 locale. If you need a different one, please cut a pull request against docker_build.py.

Running ofxgetter in Docker

If you wish to use the ofxgetter script inside the Docker container, some special settings are needed:

  1. You must mount the statement save path (STATEMENTS_SAVE_PATH) into the container.
  2. You must mount the Vault token file path (TOKEN_PATH) into the container.
  3. You must set either the VAULT_ADDR environment variable, or the VAULT_ADDR setting.

As an example, for using ofxgetter in Docker with your statements saved to /home/myuser/statements on your host computer and your Vault token stored in /home/myuser/.vault-token on your host computer, you would set STATEMENTS_SAVE_PATH in your settings file to /statements and TOKEN_PATH to /.token, and add to your docker run command:

-v /home/myuser/statements:/statements \
-v /home/myuser/.vault-token:/.token

Assuming your container was running with --name biweeklybudget, you could run ofxgetter (e.g. via cron) as:

docker exec biweeklybudget /bin/sh -c 'cd /statements && /app/bin/ofxgetter'

We run explicitly in the statements directory so that if ofxgetter encounters an error when using a ScreenScraper class, the screenshots and HTML output will be saved to the host filesystem.

Command Line Entrypoints and Scripts

biweeklybudget provides the following setuptools entrypoints (command-line script wrappers in bin/). First setup your environment according to the instructions above.

  • bin/db_tester.py - Skeleton of a script that connects to and inits the DB. Edit this to use for one-off DB work. To get an interactive session, use python -i bin/db_tester.py.
  • loaddata - Entrypoint for dropping all existing data and loading test fixture data, or your base data. This is an awful, manual hack right now.
  • ofxbackfiller - Entrypoint to backfill OFX Statements to DB from disk.
  • ofxgetter - Entrypoint to download OFX Statements for one or all accounts, save to disk, and load to DB. See OFX.
  • wishlist2project - For any projects with “Notes” fields matching an Amazon wishlist URL of a public wishlist (^https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/), synchronize the wishlist items to the project. Requires wishlist==0.1.2.