Fill in the journal with all your transactions. Look at the dashboard to get a summary: debit, credit.
To setup a whitelist of urls, define ENV["HOSTS"] as a comma separated list. Sending emails uses the ENV["DEFAULT_HOST"] variable For example, in a .env file:
HOSTS=foo.example.com, foo.example.test
DEFAULT_HOST=foo.example.com
Background jobs are picked up by a supervisor running inside the web server. That is on by default in development. Set SOLID_QUEUE_IN_PUMA=false to leave them to a separate bin/jobs process instead.
The app answers Model Context Protocol requests at /mcp, so Claude Code or Codex can read the books and file transactions for you. It answers only on the host named by ASSISTANT_HOST (finances.home.arpa), which keeps it on the home network.
An assistant can read the categories, find the transactions that still need one and file them, search the accounts and teach the books to recognise a shop, list the budgets, and say how the budget for a period is doing category by category.
It can also change the plan: set what a category may cost per month, and start a new budget, which can only start today or later. A budget that has already finished is off limits to an assistant — correct one of those on the budgets page instead.
Each user has their own token. Read yours with bin/kamal console:
User.find_by(name: "Your Name").assistant_tokenConnect Claude Code to it:
claude mcp add --transport http journal http://finances.home.arpa/mcp \
--header "Authorization: Bearer <your token>"
regenerate_assistant_token revokes the old token and issues a new one.
Nothing by hand. bin/start-app runs db:prepare on every boot, so the extra databases holding the cache, the job queue and live updates are created on the first deploy that needs them.
Do check the volume. All four SQLite files live under storage/db/, which config/deploy.yml mounts as persistent storage — without that mount every deploy starts from an empty database.
Build the image using
docker build --build-arg RUBY_VERSION=$(cat .ruby-version) -t journal_administration .