This is the main project to run Actual, a local-first personal finance tool. It comes with the latest version of Actual, and a server to persist changes and make data available across all devices.

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Non-technical users

While we don’t yet have an official hosting provider, PikaPods offers managed hosting for non-technical users, starting at around US$1.40/month as of mid-2023.

(If you provide a service like this, feel free to open a PR and add it to this section and our docs!)

Running

It's very easy to get started. Clone this repo, install deps, and start it:

git clone https://github.com/actualbudget/actual-server.git
cd actual-server
yarn install
yarn start

Go to https://localhost:5006 in your browser and you'll see Actual.

Running via Docker

To run using a Docker container you can use following commands;

git clone https://github.com/actualbudget/actual-server.git
cd actual-server
docker build -t actual-server .
docker run -p 5006:5006 actual-server

The multi-arch Docker container image runs on amd64, arm64, and armv7 platforms. Please be warned that Actual may be sluggish on armv7, but users report that it does work.

Note: if you would like to build the edge image variant locally, make sure you run ./docker/download-artifacts.sh first. Then run docker build . -f docker/edge-ubuntu.Dockerfile --build-arg GITHUB_TOKEN="ghp_your-personal-access-token".

Deploying

You should deploy your server so it's always running. We recommend fly.io which makes it incredibly easy and provides a free plan.

fly.io allows running the application directly and provides a free tier. You should be comfortable with using the command line to set it up though.

Create an account. Although you are required to enter payment details, everything we do here will work on the free tier and you won't be charged.

Next, install the flyctl utility. Run flyctl auth login to sign into your account.

Copy fly.template.toml to fly.toml. Open fly.toml and customize the app name on the first line of the file.

Now, run flyctl launch from actual-server. You should have a running app now! To get to the Actual UI, simply run flyctl open

Whenever you want to update Actual, update the versions of @actual-app/api and @actual-app/web in package.json and run flyctl deploy.

Using a custom Docker setup

Actual is also available as a Docker image ready to be run in your own custom environment.

• Docker Hub: actualbudget/actual-server
• Github Registry: ghcr.io/actualbudget/actual-server

Persisting server data

One problem with the above setup is every time you deploy, it will wipe away all the data on the server. You'll need to bootstrap the instance again and upload your files.

Let's move the data somewhere that persists. With fly.io we can create a volume. Run this command:

flyctl volumes create actual_data

Now we need to tell Actual to use this volume. Add this in fly.toml:

[mounts]
  source="actual_data"
  destination="/data"

That's it! Actual will automatically check if the /data directory exists and use it automatically.

Configuring the server

The server accepts several configuration options, including for HTTPS certificates and various file paths. The documentation website has a page dedicated to configuration options

Configuring the server URL

The Actual app is totally separate from the server. In this project, they happen to both be served by the same server, but the app doesn't know where the server lives.

The server could live on a completely different domain. You might setup Actual so that the app and server are running in completely separate places.

Since Actual doesn't know what server to use, the first thing it does is asks you for the server URL. If you are running this project, simply click "Use this domain" and it will automatically fill it in with the current domain. This works because we are serving the app and server in the same place.