Suggestion: Firefly III Personal Finance Manager

[walker93]

Creating a software request

Formal software information

• Software title | Firefly III
• Short description | self-hosted personal expenses and financial manager
• Official URL (if available) | https://www.firefly-iii.org/
• GitHub URL (if available) | https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii
• (Official) install documentation | https://docs.firefly-iii.org/firefly-iii/installation/self_hosted/

Are there similar/alternative software titles available with DietPi-Software?

• Didn't found any

What makes your requested software better than the above solutions, if available?

It is fully open source, without any (feature) limitation to free users. It has a large feature range based on available apps and a large active community. Didn't find any other self-hosted solutions capable of all the features this software supports.

How can DietPi make the installation easier or compatible, than following the install instructions or do APT installation, if available?

• it also supports docker and docker compose installations if it's easier to automate.

Can you provide the installation steps that you would suggest DietPi-Software to do?

1. Install a LAMP stack with php 8.0
2. it also requires the following php modules:
   • PHP BCMath Arbitrary Precision Mathematics
   • PHP Internationalization extension
   • PHP Curl
   • PHP Zip
   • PHP GD
   • PHP XML
   • PHP MBString
   • PHP LDAP

Are you willing to help maintaining the software installation, e.g. in case of needed setup changes due to updates etc.? This is not needed, but could speed up our decision to implement it, as man power is always a topic :wink:.

• Sorry, I am very unexperienced in bash coding.

[Joulinar]

PHP8 could be a bit of a challenge as we use Debian or Raspbian repository and both ship PHP7.4 on Bullseye atm.

[walker93]

Yeah, that was my concern too. Unfortunately in the docs they don't provide any support to older versions of PHP, the good news is that somehow this proves how up to date the project is and how is currently actively maintained.

Do you think would be possible to automate the DietPi-Software installation using docker compose? https://docs.firefly-iii.org/firefly-iii/installation/docker/

Any suggestions on how I can install it independently without messing my current Nextcloud Installation? Thanks

[Joulinar]

Usually we try to avoid including docker containers into dietpi-software as there is not that much we can automate. We offer all needed tools like docker, docker compose as install option. For starting the container you simply could follow the guide you linked. Only thing needed would be to change the port exposed as port 80 is already used by Nextcloud web server.

[MichaIng]

Actually it is pretty simple to install PHP8.0 on any Debian: https://deb.sury.org/ But we learned the hard way that applying this automatically causes a lot of mid- and long-term trouble with users who do not understand the implications, e.g. that installing the non-versioned meta packages (like php-fpm instead of php8.0-fpm) will always pull the currently latest PHP version from that repository, so that we had many users ending with multiple PHP versions and FPM instances running, or breaking their webservers PHP access/configuration when the old one was removed, lost modules/configurations etc. And of course this repository is incompatible with ARMv6 (RPi 1 and Zero models), which means two different solutions, causing additional maintenance trouble.

So I decided to never ship a different PHP version again than the one natively provided by the distro version/repo. But we may add a smarter auto-detection or already installed PHP versions and whether the packages are available, and in case use that one in dietpi-software. So whenever an admin installed a newer PHP version manually, hopefully knowing about the implications, dietpi-software will respect it and not force an additional older PHP installation.