Local Installation

The easiest way to get Actual running locally is to use actual-server.

Actual server is used for syncing changes across devices. It comes with the latest version of the Actual web client.

Prerequisites

• The Actual server requires Node.js v18 or greater. You can download and install the latest version of Node.js from Node.js website (we recommend downloading the “LTS” version).

  • If you're on Windows, during installation of Node.js, be sure to select Automatically install the necessary tools from the Tools for Native Modules page. This is required to build better-sqlite3. If you missed this when you installed Node.js, double-click C:\Program Files\nodejs\install_tools.bat from the File Explorer or run it in a terminal.

• Consider using a tool like nvm or asdf to install and manage multiple versions of Node.js.

• You’ll also need to have Git installed. The Git website has instructions for downloading and working with Git for all supported operating systems.

• Actual uses yarn packages. You can install yarn using the following command:

  npm install --global yarn

Installing Actual

1. After the prerequisites are fulfilled, clone the Actual server project in your project root directory where you want to install Actual.

   git clone https://github.com/actualbudget/actual-server.git

2. Navigate to the Actual Server in your project root director.

   cd actual-server

3. Install all the required dependencies using yarn.

   yarn install

Running Actual

After the Actual server is installed, start the Actual server by running the following command:

yarn start

Note that if you restart your computer, you’ll have to run this command again to start the server.

Accessing Actual

After the server has been started, you can access Actual using your browser at http://localhost:5006.

When accessing Actual for the first time, you may be prompted to provide a URL for the server. For a local installation, click the Use localhost:5006 button to use the server you've configured.

Updating Actual

1. Stop the server if it’s running. You can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL-C (even on macOS) to stop the server or close the terminal window it’s running from.
2. Run git pull from the directory you cloned the project into. This will download the latest server code.
3. Run yarn install from that same directory. This will download the latest web client code, along with any updated dependencies for the server.
4. Restart the server by running yarn start.

Actual is constantly evolving to include new features and improve the user's experience. It is always recommended that your local installation be updated with our latest releases.