Development

Setting up a development environment

If you want to hack on Fava or run the latest development version, make sure you have recent enough versions of the following installed (ideally with your system package manager):

• Python 3 - as Fava is written in Python,

• Node.js - with npm, to build the frontend,

• Make - to run various build / lint/ test targets,

• uv - to install the development environment and run scripts.

Then this will get you up and running:

git clone https://github.com/beancount/fava.git
cd fava
# setup a virtual environment (at .venv) and install Fava and development
# dependencies into it:
make dev

You can start Fava in the virtual environment as usual by running fava. Running in debug mode with fava --debug is useful for development.

You can run the tests with make test and the linters by running make lint. There are further make targets defined, see the Makefile for details. After any changes to the Javascript code, you will need to re-build the frontend, which you can do by running make. If you are working on the frontend code, you can use make watch to rerun the build on file changes.

If you need a newer version of Beancount than the latest released one, you can install from source like so (more details here):

pip install git+https://github.com/beancount/beancount@v2

Contributions are very welcome, just open a PR on GitHub.

Fava is released under the MIT License.