ExpenseWise

ExpenseWise is a Django app to track expenses and income, with category prediction and forecasting.

Features

• Expense and income tracking
• Category prediction using ML
• Expense forecasting
• User authentication
• Instant account creation (no email activation step)

Local setup (Windows)

py -3.11 -m venv .venv
.\.venv\Scripts\activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt
python nltk_downloader.py
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

Open: http://127.0.0.1:8000/

Local setup (macOS/Linux)

requirements.txt in this repo is UTF-16, so convert before installing:

python3.11 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -c "import pathlib; p=pathlib.Path('requirements.txt'); pathlib.Path('requirements.utf8.txt').write_text(p.read_text(encoding='utf-16'), encoding='utf-8')"
pip install -r requirements.utf8.txt
python nltk_downloader.py
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

Deploy to Render (no Docker, no YAML)

Create a Web Service in Render from this repo.

This repo includes:

• .python-version (pins Python 3.11)
• requirements.render.txt (clean dependency list for Render)
• render-build.sh and render-start.sh

Use these commands in Render:

Build Command

bash render-build.sh

Start Command

bash render-start.sh

Environment variables on Render

Set these in Render dashboard:

• DJANGO_DEBUG=1
• DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=<any long random string>
• DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS=<your-service>.onrender.com
• DJANGO_CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS=https://<your-service>.onrender.com

Optional SMTP (only if you want outbound email features like alerts):

• DJANGO_EMAIL_BACKEND=django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend
• DJANGO_EMAIL_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
• DJANGO_EMAIL_PORT=587
• DJANGO_EMAIL_USE_TLS=1
• DJANGO_EMAIL_HOST_USER=<your-email>
• DJANGO_EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD=<your-app-password>
• DJANGO_DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL=<your-email>

Keep DB data between deploys (recommended)

Attach a Render disk and set:

• DJANGO_DB_PATH=/var/data/mydatabase

Without a disk, SQLite data can be lost on redeploy/restart.

Useful commands

Create admin user:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Reset all data:

python manage.py flush