Fava and example data

Simplest way to avoid having to install Beancount, Fava and all the other packages manually is to use docker-compose (but you’ll have to install Docker first).

First, check out the repository:

      git clone https://github.com/Evernight/lazy-beancount

Then run the Docker container using

      cd lazy-beancount/example_data
    docker compose up

which will pull the public image of Lazy Beancount.

Then navigate to http://localhost:8777/ in your browser and explore available functionality on the example data.

Other options are described at https://github.com/Evernight/lazy-beancount (including building your own Docker container, or setting things up locally using conda on Mac or Linux). If you want to install Beancount on Windows, it seems it may be noticeably simpler to use Docker, otherwise follow Installing Beancount and look for related threads in the groups.

Use git for your data

You will have cloned a git repository already. Now, you can use that same repository to add your actual financial data (under the data folder). This way you will be able to revert unwanted changes if you screw something up when adding/modifying your data. It’s one of the advantages of using plain text accounting.

Obviously, don’t push your private data to the public repository. Instead of using the provided data folder, you can also copy it elsewhere locally on your machine and create a new git repository in place for keeping just your data and configs. Run docker compose up from that directory in the same way as above.

Don’t forget to commit regularly to preserve working snapshots of your data and configs.

Note on self-hosting

I would not recommend to expose the ports, various system and data through a public server unless you really know what you’re doing. This setup has not been developed and tested for security and authentication when run as a publicly exposed service.