Go DB Ledger

GoDBLedger is an open source accounting system that aims to make the recording of double entry bookkeeping transactions programmable. It provide users with normal features that most finance systems tend to lack such as api endpoints for your scripts and a database backend with a clear schema so you can analyse your financial data using your software of choice. The ultimate goal is for your whole financial process to be automated from data entry to compilation of financials/tax returns.

How it works:

You are a business or individual wanting a system to record your profits and produce financial reports. You dont want to pay a cloud provider and you want to keep your financial data under your own control. You spin up a linux server (or raspberry pi) choose a database (Currently SQLite3 and MySQL are available) and you set up GoDBLedger to run on that server. You now have a place to send your double entry bookkeeping transactions which get saved into your own database!

GoDBLedger gives you an api for the recording of transactions and there are some command line binaries included to get you started.

Watch the demo video

To get started view the quickstart on the wiki: https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger/wiki/Quickstart

Executables

Command	Description
Godbledger	The main server. It is the access point for transactions that will be saved to the accounting database.
Ledger-cli	A CLI client that can be used to transmit transactions to the server.
Reporter	Builds basic reports from the database on the command line.

Communicating with Godbledger and software examples

GRPC and Proto Buffers The primary way to communicate with Godbledger is through the GRPC endpoint, submitting a transaction that contains your journal entry/transaction.

a python client with example calls can be found here

Ledger-cli included with this repo communicates with Godbledger using GRPC and gives some convenient CLI commands

Ledger files ledger-cli allows for the processing of ledger files. This has been roughly implemented by forking https://github.com/howeyc/ledger

Trading Simulator An example project has been developed that simulates a market trader bot and the trades are recorded using Godbledger

Reporter The general usage of Godbledger is not to provide information but to simply guide transactions to be recorded in a consistent manner in the database. To actually view your financial information we should query the database directly. Reporter has two SQL queries in built (Transaction Listing, and Trial Balance) that will be formatted in a table/json/csv for your viewing.

reporter trialbalance
reporter transactions

PDF Financial Statements Reporter also has a function to generate pdf financial reports. Two templates for a Profit and Loss and a Balance sheet have been provided.

reporter pdf -template profitandloss

The PDF files are generated from handlebars iterating over the tagged accounts. This is compiled into PDF using nodejs.

Templates can be viewed here

Database and configuration

Running godbledger locally will set a default configuration if none has been provided and use Sqlite3 as the default database, saving both the config file and the Sqlite3 database file in your default data directory.

Default Data Directory

The default data directory can be found here:

Host OS	Default Data Directory
linux	~/.ledger/
macos	~/Library/ledger/
windows	%HOME%/.ledger/

Running in Docker

Godbledger comes with a docker-compose.yml file and some make targets to help build the godbledger server into a docker container and launch it with a mysql backend, configuring both to store state inside the host's default DATA_DIR so that state persists by default across restarts of the containers.

1. Build the container image

   make docker-build
   

   This builds godbledger into an alpine-based container image tagged locally as godbledger

2. Start mysql and godbledger server in docker

   make docker-start
   

   This invokes docker-compose up with a few env vars set for default configuration.

   There are some env vars which can adjust configuration but by default:

   • mysql is running and reachable through docker at localhost:3306

     • a ledger database has been created along with the following local user account:
       • username: godbledger
       • password: password

   • godbledger server is available through docker at localhost:50051 and configured to use that mysql service as a backend

   • CLI tools running on your local host machine can connect with the following values in your local config.toml file:

     Host = "127.0.0.1"
     RPCPort = "50051"
     DatabaseType = "mysql"
     DatabaseLocation = "godbledger:password@tcp(localhost:3306)/ledger?charset=utf8mb4,utf8

3. Stop mysql and godbledger server

   In the terminal where you ran make docker-start you can use ctrl-c to gracefully shut down both containers.

   From another terminal you can run make docker-stop which invokes docker-compose down

   Because the database and docker config.toml files are stored on your host machine, you can safely stop and start both apps without losing data.

   NOTE you may risk losing data if you type ctrl-c twice and force an early shutdown of mysql

Running in Kubernetes

We provide sample yaml files which demonstrate how to configure and deploy mysql and godbledger to a kubernetes cluster.

Building the Proto Buffers

Ensure that you have the latest version of the protobuf toolchain (currently at 3.14.0):

• See: Protocol Buffer Compiler Installation

Call from the root directory

make proto

SQL Querys

default stored location for database is .ledger/ledgerdata sqlite3 ledger.db

Select all transactions

SELECT * FROM splits JOIN split_accounts ON splits.split_id = split_accounts.split_id

Find the accounts with Tag

SELECT * FROM accounts where account_id in (select account_id from account_tag where tag_id = 8);

Contributing

Local Development

1. Install golang version 1.13 or higher for your OS and architecture:

   • https://golang.org/doc/install

2. To build the godbledger executables natively for your OS and architecture you can simply use Make

   make
   

   The default make target is build-native which builds binaries native to your environment into the ./build/bin/native/ folder.

   NOTE: on windows you may need to install a C++ tool chain (e.g. tdm-gcc) in order to cross compile the sqlite dependency.

   After building you can run the version you just built:

   ./build/bin/native/godbledger
   

3. Run the linter to discover any style or structural errors:

   make lint
   

4. Run the tests

   make test
   

   NOTE: the test suite depends on the build-native target as it includes an integration test which spins up an instance of godbledger

Build architecture

The primary entrypoint into the build scripts is the Makefile which provides the aforementioned build targets:

• build-native (default)
• lint
• test

All three of which call into the ./utils/ci.go script to do the actual work of setting up required env vars, building the executiables, and configuring output folders.

An additional ./utils/make-release.sh script is available to help orchestrate the creation of zip/tarfiles.

Cross-compiling with xgo/docker

In addition to the default, native build target, the Makefile also offers a build-cross target which uses a forked version of xgo (https://github.com/techknowlogick/xgo) to build for different operating systems and architectures, including linux variants, a MacOS-compatible binary, and windows-compatible exe files.

make build-cross

Go tooling natively offers cross-compiling features when the CGO_ENABLED=0 flag is set; godbledger's go-sqlite3 dependency however requires CGO_ENABLED=1 in order to link in the C-level bindings for SQLite. Cross-compiling golang when CGO is enable is significantly more complicated as each platform and architecture can require a custom C++ toolchain.

xgo achieves consistency in cross-compilation using Docker, so running Docker Engine on your dev box is a requirement to running the build-cross target.

Install Docker Engine

The Docker web site includes detailed instructions on installing and running Docker Engine on a variety of supported platforms.

NOTE: if installing Docker Engine on a linux system make sure to follow the Post-installation steps for Linux in order to be able to run docker commands from local user accounts.

Roadmap

Discussion can be found on this github issue: #169