Fava Currency Tracker plugin

[Vasily M]

Hi all,

Just released a Currency Tracker plugin for Fava: https://github.com/Evernight/fava-currency-tracker

It's meant to be an improved experience over Commodities page in Fava that gets really messy once you have a bunch of different commodities and historical price directives.
Also it gives you an ability to fetch historical prices from the internet using bean-price and pricehist libraries without leaving your browser.

I found it weird that I have a monster of a financial tool running on my own machine but still have to go to search and go to external site to look at the historical currency rates in a less-than-optimal interface. Now this is solved, and is good enough at least for me.

The https://github.com/andreasgerstmayr/fava-dashboards and https://github.com/andreasgerstmayr/fava-portfolio-returns plugins were referenced for the technology stack, check these out as well if you haven't yet.

[Tim Tickner]

Super easy to plug in and provides some helpful insight right away, thanks for sharing!

Just out of curiosity, is the date-specific price file the "recommended" way to handle historical prices? I have one looonnggg `Prices.bean` file that just gets appended to, but thinking I might rework to use the structure you have in the fetcher. Thoughts?

Tim

[Vasily M]

Thanks for feedback, glad it's useful!

I'm not sure if there's a "recommended" way, I guess it's more about what works for you. That's how I use bean-price most of the time, getting a couple data points at the same time I update my ledger regularly.

https://gitlab.com/chrisberkhout/pricehist allows fetching prices for a period of time and apparently does it in a single request (for a single currency) so it's blazingly fast. I've been occasionally using it to fetch prices for the whole period for the commodities that are more important (e.g. base currencies). So I've added that option as well.

I guess under the hood bean-price sequentially goes through the list of commodities and does the same so it could in theory support <all commodities> x <whole period> fetching. For example, I haven't yet looked in detail into how bean-price --update works. If it does it efficiently (at least not more than one request per currency), I could add that support as well.

Regarding the structure of files, I'm not sure what people are normally using. I personally prefer multi-file setup because it's easier to manage and I haven't noticed any overhead. Happy to add more configuration/options regarding where the fetched data goes but decided not to overcomplicate things for now.

Vasily