Firefly Bot

A Telegram bot to create transactions in Firefly III

Setup

First you'll have to generate a Telegram Bot token through BotFather. Once you generate the token, keep it safe.

Docker (Recommended)

docker create \
  --name=firefly-bot \ 
  -e TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=<your-bot-token> \
  -v </path/to/config>:/config \
  vjfalk1/firefly-telegram-bot

Manual

You'll need python 3.8 and pip installed

• Clone the repository
• Install dependencies by running pip install -r requirements.txt
• Run export TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=<your-bot-token>
• Run python3 ./src/bot.py

Usage

Setup

• Once the bot is up and running, initiate a chat with the bot. Send /start to initiate setup
  • /start can also be used to re-run the setup at a later time
• You will first be asked for your Firefly URL. Enter the full URL including the protocol. Eg - https://firefly.host.com
  • Make sure not to include a trailing slash
• Second, you will be asked for your User Token. You will have to generate one from the profile section in your Firefly instance, under OAuth.
• Lastly, you will be asked for a default account, by default all transactions will use this account as the source account, however, you can override it per transaction

Creating a Transaction

All you need to do is send a message to the bot with the following format

Amount, Description, Category, Budget, Source account, Destination account

Only the first two values are needed. The rest are optional. The description value is used for destination account as well.

Examples

A simple one -

5, Starbucks

One with all the fields being used -

5, Mocha with an extra shot for Steve, Coffee, Food Budget, UCO Bank, Starbucks

You can skip specfic fields by leaving them empty (except the first two) -

5, Starbucks, , Food Budget, UCO Bank

You can also specify accounts by using their id instead of their name -

5, Mocha with an extra shot for Steve, Coffee, Food Budget, 5, 35

Development

• Clone the repository
• Install Poetry
• Install dependencies by running poetry install
• Run poetry shell to activate virtualenv
• Start the bot by running python src/bot.py

Notes

Why Poetry AND requirements.txt? I don't want to use poetry inside Docker. It's unnecessary bloat and complexity. So I just generate a requirements.txt anytime I change deps using - poetry export -f requirements.txt > requirements.txt. It can then be used for Docker, or just anyone who wants to use this without having to install (and figure out) poetry.