Budget annually, report monthly

Use Firefly III to store transactions, but implement my own budgeting system. Goal: have a single app for recording and reporting, instead of using Firefly and an Excel spreadsheet. I budget a yearly amount for each category, and want a simple app to record transactions and track my budget, while still being able to use advanced features in firefly-iii if needed. For more details, see DESIGN.md.

Screenshots

Local development

Prerequisites: working installations of Go and NodeJS.

Make sure you have a working installation of firefly-iii. In src/backend, copy .env.sample to .env and update the firefly-iii API key (in Firefly: Options > Profile > OAuth > Personal Access Tokens) and URL. The database connection string is optional (if unspecified, a SQLite file will be created in src/backend).

Then, simply make -j2 dev, which will start the backend and frontend, and restart either if their source files are changed.

Deployments

Since this application does not provide any authentication, a proxy should provide access control (e.g. using client certificate or basic authentication).

You can build the backend with make backend (backend binary in src/backend) and the frontend with make frontend (build folder in src/frontend).

I put the backend behind an nginx reverse proxy for the /api path, and serve the React frontend under /app (statically with nginx) on the same domain. You'll want both to be on the same host so that you don't have trouble with CORS.

Relevant excerpt from my nginx config:

# App icons and a redirect to the app (helps iOS get the right icon)
root /usr/local/www/lychnos-splash;

# React build served statically
location /app/ {
		alias /usr/local/www/lychnos/src/frontend/build/;
		index  index.html index.htm;
		try_files $uri /app/index.html; # allows React paths to work without backing files
}

# Go service, listening on port 8080
location /api/ {
		# Important: don't keep a trailing path slash on proxy path (prevent /api/api)
		proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
}