dougthor42/PyBank

Project Status?

Opened this issue · 1 comments

JBaczuk commented

Just wondering if there is still interest in this project. I think an open source alternative to mint.com is very interesting because mint.com can share data about transactions, accounts, etc. Were there any specific challenges that were too difficult to overcome or just too much of a time commitment? Would like a self-hosted alternative, and might be interested in contributing if I'm not the only one interested!

dougthor42 commented

Sorry for the delay, I've been off in the land of no internet or cell service. And it was wonderful.

Sadly this project is in a bit of a holding pattern. Aside from no longer having much time to work on it, the primary issue is parsing the OFX files - I've never been happy with my implementation nor with the other OFX parsers out there.

IIRC, the project is in a state where you can manually add expenses and save things to the encrypted SQLite file. Download/import of OFX files is not yet implemented, but parsing (while crappy) is working.

Here's a summary of project issues (at least the ones I can remember):

  • OFX parsing: all-around not good.
  • One of my banks will not give me the URL for downloading OFX files directly, so I have less incentive to continue the project. I really want this project to be able to auto-download the OFX files.
  • When I started this project, I was gung-ho about wxPython since that's what I was using at work. Now I've been doing more web-based stuff (Flask) and am considering changing this project to use a localhost standalone web interface (via flask's built-in webserver).
    • Why? Because I've found UI/UX to be a bit easier with Flask + various JS libs. It also might be easier to package (compile/distribute) the app as a .exe for Windows users (eg: me) without wxPython
    • However, I've contributed some nice plotting stuff to wxPython that I'd like to use... Perhaps Dash or plot.ly would be a good substitute.
  • I should up it to Python 3.6+

That's all I can remember right now.

Thanks for the interest in the project! If you want to contribute, please feel free to open a PR. I'm available to help with understanding the code (though it might take a little while for me to remember WTF I was thinking...

Having a 2nd person interested definitely helps with my own interest in the project. Perhaps I'll even find some time to work on it!