actualpy

Python API implementation for Actual server.

Actual Budget is a superfast and privacy-focused app for managing your finances.

Warning

The Javascript API to interact with Actual server already exists, and is battle-tested as it is the core of the Actual frontend libraries. If you intend to use a reliable and well tested library, that is the way to go.

Installation

Install it via Pip:

pip install actualpy

If you want to have the latest git version, you can also install using the repository url:

pip install git+https://github.com/bvanelli/actualpy.git

For querying basic information, you additionally install the CLI, checkout the basic documentation

Basic usage

The most common usage would be downloading a budget to more easily build queries. This would you could handle the Actual database using SQLAlchemy instead of having to retrieve the data via the export. The following script will print every single transaction registered on the Actual budget file:

from actual import Actual
from actual.queries import get_transactions

with Actual(
        base_url="http://localhost:5006",  # Url of the Actual Server
        password="<your_password>",  # Password for authentication
        encryption_password=None,  # Optional: Password for the file encryption. Will not use it if set to None.
        # Set the file to work with. Can be either the file id or file name, if name is unique
        file="<file_id_or_name>",
        # Optional: Directory to store downloaded files. Will use a temporary if not provided
        data_dir="<path_to_data_directory>",
        # Optional: Path to the certificate file to use for the connection, can also be set as False to disable SSL verification
        cert="<path_to_cert_file>"
) as actual:
    transactions = get_transactions(actual.session)
    for t in transactions:
        account_name = t.account.name if t.account else None
        category = t.category.name if t.category else None
        print(t.date, account_name, t.notes, t.amount, category)

The file will be matched to either one of the following:

• The name of the budget, found top the top left cornet
• The ID of the budget, a UUID that is only available if you inspect the result of the method list_user_files
• The Sync ID of the budget, a UUID available on the frontend on the "Advanced options"
• If none of those options work for you, you can search for the file manually with list_user_files and provide the object directly:

from actual import Actual

with Actual("http://localhost:5006", password="mypass") as actual:
    actual.set_file(actual.list_user_files().data[0])
    actual.download_budget()

Checkout the full documentation for more examples.

Understanding how Actual handles changes

The Actual budget is stored in a sqlite database hosted on the user's browser. This means all your data is fully local and can be encrypted with a local key, so that not even the server can read your statements.

The Actual Server is a way of only hosting files and changes. Since re-uploading the full database on every single change is too heavy, Actual only stores one state of the database and everything added by the user via frontend or via the APIs are individual changes on top of the "base database" stored on the server. This means that on every change, done locally, a SYNC request is sent to the server with a list of the following string parameters:

• dataset: the name of the table where the change happened.
• row: the row identifier for the entry that was added/update. This would be the primary key of the row (a uuid value)
• column: the column that had the value changed
• value: the new value. Since it's a string, the values are either prefixed by S: to denote a string, N: to denote a numeric value and 0: to denote a null value.

All individual column changes are computed on an insert, serialized with protobuf and sent to the server to be stored. Null values and server defaults are not required to be present in the SYNC message, unless a column is changed to null. If the file is encrypted, the protobuf content will also be encrypted, so that the server does not know what was changed.

New clients can use this individual changes to then sync their local copies and add the changes executed on other users. Whenever a SYNC request is done, the response will also contain changes that might have been done in other browsers, so that the user the retrieve the information and update its local copy.

But this also means that new users need to download a long list of changes, possibly making the initialization slow. Thankfully, user is also allowed to reset the sync. When doing a reset of the file via frontend, the browser is then resetting the file completely and clearing the list of changes. This would make sure all changes are actually stored in the database. This is done on the frontend under Settings > Reset sync, and causes the current file to be reset (removed from the server) and re-uploaded again, with all changes already in place.

This means that, when using this library to operate changes on the database, you have to make sure that either:

• do a sync request is made using the actual.commit() method. This only handles pending operations that haven't yet been committed, generates a change list with them and posts them on the sync endpoint.
• do a full re-upload of the database is done.

Contributing

The goal is to have more features implemented and tested on the Actual API. If you have ideas, comments, bug fixes or requests feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

To install requirements, install both requirements files:

# optionally setup a venv (recommended)
python3 -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate
# install requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

We use pre-commit to ensure consistent formatting across different developers. To develop locally, make sure you install all development requirements, then install pre-commit hooks. This would make sure the formatting runs on every commit.

pre-commit install

To run tests, make sure you have docker installed (how to install docker). Run the tests on your machine:

pytest