payme

A very minimal personal finance tracking application.

payme was designed for self-hosting in my homelab environment. Run it on a Raspberry Pi, NAS, or any always-on server to track your household finances privately without relying on third-party services. Your financial data stays on your network, under your control.

I grew tired of my spreadsheet, and did not care for any of the third party services out there. So I decided to build my own. As such, you can see this is very opinionated. The lack of advanced financial budgeting features is intentional, though, I am open to different features and components.

Generally, if you don't like it, fork it and make it your own or consider contributing to the project (read CONTRIBUTING.md for more information).

Requirements

• Rust 1.75+
• Node.js 20+
• SQLite3

Setup

Backend

cd backend
cargo build --release

Environment variables: See .env.example for all available variables.

DATABASE_URL=sqlite:payme.db?mode=rwc
JWT_SECRET=some-random-string
PORT=3001

Running both services

The run.sh script starts both the backend and frontend simultaneously:

chmod +x run.sh
./run.sh

This launches:

• Backend at http://localhost:3001
• Frontend at http://localhost:3000

Press Ctrl+C to stop both services.

You can obviously run the backend and frontend separately if you want to by navigating to the respective directories and running the commands there.

Database

SQLite database created at backend/payme.db. Tables auto-migrate on startup.

Export/import database via the UI download button or /api/export endpoint.

OpenAPI Swagger endpoint

To view all the api endpoints and schemas, go to: http://localhost:3001/swagger-ui

Docker

Docker is the recommended way to deploy payme in a homelab. The multi-stage build creates a minimal image with just the compiled binary and static frontend assets.

Using Docker Compose (Recommended)

# Set a secure JWT secret
echo "JWT_SECRET=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" > .env

# Build and start
docker compose up -d

Access payme at http://your-ip:3001

Manual Docker Build

docker build -t payme .
docker run -d \
  --name payme \
  -p 3001:3001 \
  -v payme_data:/data \
  -e JWT_SECRET=your-secret-key \
  payme

Data Persistence

The SQLite database is stored in a Docker volume at /data. To backup:

docker cp payme:/data/payme.db ./backup.db

Reverse Proxy

For production, place payme behind a reverse proxy (nginx, Caddy, Traefik) with HTTPS. Example nginx config:

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name finance.yourdomain.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:3001;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}