keepbooks is a little tool to help you with book-keeping. Our general book-keeping workflow is described in detail in this blog post. The technical side of it goes like this:
Put all your book-keeping documents in a folder structure that has categories at the top level (so “invoices”, “vouchers”, …), and immediately below that, put a directory for each year-month pair. So the invoices of January 2020 are kept in invoices/2020-01 (see the sample-directory directory for an example).
To pass on the relevant documents for a single month to your accountant, execute keepbooks, passing at least…
- …the source directory where all of your document history resides
- …the target directory which might be served via HTTP
keepbooks will take the current month and year and copy the relevant directories to the taret directory, keeping the directory/subdirectory structure as it was. keepbooks will not change any directories by default (it will do a “dry run”), unless you specify --wet-run on the command line.
You can instruct keepbooks to use a different month/year using the --date argument. Folders can be excluded using exclude. Also, group/user rights can be changed using --user and --group.
The easiest way to try the program is via Docker. Just pull the docker image via
docker run --rm -v /src:/src -v /dst:/dst plapadoo/keepbooks --source-dir /src --target-dir /dst --user plapadoo --group plapadoo
This will pull the official image from Docker Hub and start program.
Assuming you have compiled the program yourself, you’re left with a single executable file: keepbooks. You can start it with --help to see how it’s used.
The easiest way to compile the bot or the docker image or the program from source is to use the nix package manager. With it, you can build the program using
nix-build
The resulting files will be located in the result/ directory. To build the Docker image, use
nix-build dockerimage.nix
This will, at the last line, output a path that you can feed into docker load.
The bot can be compiled using cabal-install by using cabal install --only-dependencies and then cabal install.