Self Ledger

A local-first personal finance desktop app. Track expenses, revenues, and account balances. No cloud, no accounts, no internet. All data lives in a SQLite database on your machine.

Features

• Log expenses and revenues with description, category, date, and account
• Manage multiple accounts (checking, savings, investments, etc.)
• Record transfers between accounts
• Split a purchase into N monthly transactions
• View spending and revenue trends via day-by-day line charts
• Expense breakdown by category
• See how current spending compares to the previous equivalent period
• Period notes for expenses and revenues
• Export all data to JSON or CSV
• Backup your data to a git repo as JSON

Requirements

• Go 1.21+
• Wails v2 (go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v2/cmd/wails@latest)
• Bun
• Linux: gtk3-devel and webkit2gtk4.1-devel (or equivalent for your distro)

Running in development

cd frontend && bun install && cd ..
wails dev -tags webkit2_4_1        # Linux with webkit2gtk 4.1
wails dev                          # macOS / Windows / Linux with webkit2gtk 4.0

This starts the Vite dev server on :5173 and opens the Wails window with hot reload.

Building

wails build -tags webkit2_4_1     # Linux with webkit2gtk 4.1
wails build                        # macOS / Windows / Linux with webkit2gtk 4.0

The binary is output to build/bin/self-ledger.

Packaging (Linux)

.deb and .rpm packages are produced by nfpm. The packages install:

File	Destination
build/bin/self-ledger	/usr/local/bin/self-ledger
frontend/static/favicon.png	/usr/share/pixmaps/self-ledger.png
self-ledger.desktop	/usr/share/applications/self-ledger.desktop

go install github.com/goreleaser/nfpm/v2/cmd/nfpm@latest
VERSION=1.0.0 nfpm package --packager deb --target build/packages/
VERSION=1.0.0 nfpm package --packager rpm --target build/packages/

Data

The database is stored at:

OS	Path
Linux	~/.config/self-ledger/self_ledger.db
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/self-ledger/self_ledger.db
Windows	%APPDATA%\self-ledger\self_ledger.db

Stack

• Frontend — SvelteKit + Svelte 5 (runes), Chart.js, Bun
• Backend — Wails v2 (Go), modernc/sqlite (pure-Go SQLite, no CGO)