Local/self-hosted You Need A Budget? Interesting. Not super opposed to paying for YNAB, but I wouldn’t say it specifically is very important to me. Even though I’ve been using it for a decade+.
I’ve tried Lunch Money a couple times but it just doesn’t click for me.
I’m trying to install Actual Budget via Docker. It’s not going great.
They tell you where the image can be found, but like… ok? What do I do with that? I ran docker pull but that doesn’t appear to have done anything.
So I followed the instructions from Immich and I’m trying to wget the compose file and I can’t because Github is blocking me (error 429)? Yet I eventually found where the file is via a web browser and can access that… so I guess I’ll save that down manually?
This works, but I go to run docker compose and it won’t do anything because I have to configure something. But the documentation says configuration is optional.
I configure the data path, but it still won’t launch. This is because the environment section needs to be removed or commented out if I’m not specifying anything with in it.
Ok, fine. Now the container launches and I can access it, but won’t do anything. Apparently it needs to function over HTTPS, which it turns out is a rabbit hole.
I get homebrew installed, get mkcert installed, but it's not entirely clear what I'm supposed to do with that. Then I find out you can just run Actual Budget over HTTP.
I'm not sure self-signing a certificate when I don't know what I'm doing anyway is actually preferable to just using HTTP.
Ok, so now I can actually use Actual Budget.
So far:
* Keyboard shortcuts, but not for reconciling, which is the one shortcut I use all the time.
* No budget targets/goals, although YNAB's implementation is so strange I'm not even sure that's a bad thing.
* No differentiation between account types, other than on budget or off budget. Don't think I care.
* No budget categories for credit card payments, which I think I prefer.
* Seems to have more interesting/flexible reporting, including report dashboards you can set up.
* Seems like it will pick up on reoccuring transactions, which is something I liked in Lunch Money but YNAB does not have.
* No mobile app. You can save to homescreen which kind of works offline, but only if you're launching it on the local network frequently. Otherwise things get out of sync.
So I realized I apparently set up docker-compose wrong and the data files were not where I wanted them to be. Here’s where things go really wrong.
I changed docker compose and restarted the container. This does not work. Then I removed the container and docker pulled. This also does not work.
…in the end, the file path was wrong. ./data instead of /data.
I had to log out and log back in, but everything seems fine now. Time to go outside maybe.
While I could access Actual Budget on my desktop no problem, I couldn't get it to sync again on my phone. It kept throwing an error message. Eventually I just exported the data and re-imported on my desktop and that ended up syncing fine on the phone.
I've got all my March activity and budget set up. Not fun but it is my day job so an hour or two of persistence was enough.
I'll need to see how the web app behaves on my phone without a connection to the server, but I suspect I probably don't care either way.
Really unfortunate I renewed YNAB a month ago.
Ok, fuck this. I’ve burned several precious leisure hours and I’m no further than I was yesterday WRT getting HTTPS working.
Self-signed certificates don’t seem to work, and I’m not the only one saying that. But the answer is apparently to install even more software that potentially has worse security implications and I’m just not going to do that.
Also, the mobile web version doesn't work at all outside of my home network. Might be related to HTTPS, might not be.
I learned the keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting in the Linux terminal, so I guess that’s useful?
@hwang I would suggest looking at a reverse proxy, which should significantly improve security, and generally should be easy to set up with LetsEncrypt.
The security footprint of a reverse proxy will usually be significantly better than a random service like Actual.
I use Traefik, but there are lots of options.
@GregMitchell @hwang An easy reverse proxy is 'nginx proxy manager'. But even easy isn't ... easy.
For a classic reverse proxy and let's encrypt SSL certs to work, you'll also need port forwarding (port 80 and 443) to be enabled on your router/firewall and a domain name that points to your external IP address.
If you don't have a fixed external IP address (most likely the case for a residential non-business internet connection), you'll also need dyndns setup.
Sounds complicated? For more security and simplicity you might be better off setting up tailscale serve. https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-serve
Dennis
Greg Mitchell
IceQbe 
