🤖chitie

Chitie stands for chi tiết & chi tiêu in Vietnamese it means detail on your expenses.

This is a bot for the Telegram messaging app using their bot platform. It helps you to keep track of your expenses, supporting your financial planning. It is simple, like sending a message to a friend on Telegram. No extra application is installed, but it can work on multiple platforms, desktops, and mobiles (like Telegram 😊)

Your data is secured on your server, which is very flexible as you can write your SQL to build reports.

# View demo

Build with

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Setup on your server

Prerequisites

To host this bot on your own, you need a few things.

• Server to run the bot on ¹
• A domain name with HTTPS enabled ²
• A bot token, which you get from registering a new bot to the @BotFather

On your server:

• Python3
• PostgreSQL
• Nginx

Configuration

Link your domain to the bot

Once you have chosen a bot, send the /setdomain command to @Botfather to link your website's domain to the bot. Then configure your widget below and embed the code on your website.

Set following environment variable on the running application session, or create an .env file in the root directory of the application

Property	Example	Description
DB_URL	postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/chitie	PostgreSQL connection url
SECRET_KEY	complex-random-string	A secret key that will be used for securely signing the session cookie and can be used for any other security related needs by extensions or your application
SERVER_NAME	chitie.yourdomain	Your web domain
TELEGRAM_SECRET	telegram-secret-string	The secret string gotten from @BotFather when create new bot
TELEGRAM_WEBHOOK_SECRET	some-secret-string	To generate a secure url for webhook endpoint

Initial setup

Install dependencies

pip install -e '.[production]'

Init database schema

alembic upgrade head

Run application

uwsgi --enable-threads --socket 0.0.0.0:5000 --protocol http -w wsgi:webserver

Usage

Expense loggin

Send a message in the configured group with the format.

<expense subject: string> <amount: float><transaction_type:enum(‘’, ‘c’)>

There are two types of transactions – debit & credit. In a logging message, if the transaction type is empty, the default value is debit, and if the amount pattern is followed with a c letter, the transaction type is credit.

Example:

Debit expense:

Credit expense:

Commands

Command	Description
/category	List all categories
/review <month-year>	Summary all expenses in the given time range. The default time range is the current month if not given

Demo

Init the expense chat group

Logging your expenses by sending a message

Review your expense in month

References

Footnotes

1. I use Digital Ocean with $6/ ↩

2. I use free SSL of Cloudflare ↩