Nextcloud HLedger

[Ryan]

Hello,

It's been a while but I owe this group an update on Nextcloud HLedger, which I attempted to start last year.

During the summer I started a new job that has been quite demanding and has left me with no free time at all to work on this. I kept thinking it would eventually cool down and I would jump back into this project. But unfortunately that hasn't happened and it's time I admit to myself that it probably won't happen any time soon.

I'm sorry for dropping out, especially to Garret and Simon. I had the best of intentions when I started it.

If anyone would like to take it over I'm happy to migrate the Github repo to another account. Please let me know if you're interested. Here are the relevant links.

• https://github.com/37Rb/nextcloud-hledger
• https://github.com/37Rb/php-hledger
• https://help.nextcloud.com/t/new-app-hledger-plain-text-accounting/114307
• https://demo.hledger.cloud

I'm more than happy to keep paying for and running the demo at https://demo.hledger.cloud which doesn't cost much if anyone wants to take over development. I'm still a regular user of hledger. In fact, now I use it for accounting and budgeting with the API3 DAO in addition to my personal finances.

Thank you for your support when I was developing the proof of concept. I'm sorry I can't take it further.

All the best,

Ryan

[Simon Michael]

No problem at all Ryan. Thank you very much for the work so far, and the update/graceful hand-off. 

Perhaps someone here will pick it up. This seems to require either another hledger contributor getting interested in Nextcloud, or vice versa. To motivate them: Nextcloud seems cool but still not well known. Is it large ? Growing ? 

[Ryan]

I don't know how large Nextcloud is or whether it's growing TBH. But from the research I did last year it's the only active open-source, self-hostable alternative to Google and Microsoft's cloud productivity suites. For HLedger users who are (at least partially) motivated by privacy it's an interesting option. If there's going to be a web interface for HLedger, it makes more sense to build it on a platform like that than to do it all from scratch. For example, Nextcloud has solid login and security out of the box. HLedger-web is missing that.

Personally, I use it as a self-hosted replacement for Google Drive, Docs, Tasks & Calendar, Trello, and Evernote.

- Ryan

On Sunday, January 16, 2022 at 11:49:18 AM UTC-6 Simon Michael (sm) wrote:

No problem at all Ryan. Thank you very much for the work so far, and the update/graceful hand-off. 

Perhaps someone here will pick it up. This seems to require either another hledger contributor getting interested in Nextcloud, or vice versa. To motivate them: Nextcloud seems cool but still not well known. Is it large ? Growing ? 

[Daniele Moro (gmail)]

Thank you also from my side, Ryan.

I find it was fair and humble from your side to announce this on the group channel, this is not often the case with volunteering software development, which then gets in a dead end track.

I hope you will be successful in your new job.

I also hope that someone will take over your project; I'm sorry I cannot,  don't have the skills and competences.

Cheers,

Dan

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[gmcg...@gmail.com]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for your work on the hledger nextcloud app! You added me as a contributor a while back and I appreciate working with you. Working on the nextcloud app was terrific for helping me work through new ideas and new solutions for helping people manage their finances in a privacy-respecting environment. While I am still quite interested in working on new solutions to lowering existing barriers-to-entry for people to adopt hledger, more recently I've become less interested in Nextcloud due to the limited exposure. I have some ideas and proof-of-concepts that I'm working on for a standalone javascript-based desktop (electron) + mobile (cordova) app that would use hledger behind the scenes, to expose a UI on top of it, very similar to the nextcloud app but also offering fully-offline operation. The porting work I did for the hledger nextcloud app to get hledger running on ARM (raspberry pi nextcloud boxes) turns out to be quite applicable to my new project, since I have already gotten hledger to execute on Android and I might end up being able to get it running on Apple iOS. Work on this new project has taken over my limited extra time at this point so I am happy to hand off the Nextcloud app to somebody else if they want to take it further.

I did a bit of work on a browser-based ledger "editor" UI to make quickly categorizing transactions and auto-completing accounts during editing very easy. This editor code (written in Javascript/Vue/Vuetify) has been pushed to a branch on the nextcloud repo but it is not quite ready to merge to master. If anybody who knows javascript is interested in using it, I would be happy to explain how it works 1-on-1. I will also be porting this editor to my new standalone app so I assume that is where it will end up making its debut.

Again, thanks for all your work!

Best,

Garret