Like ‘E’ in hledger-ui. Go right to the transaction. Don’t make the user search for it.

See https://help.nextcloud.com/t/how-to-include-a-text-editor-in-my-nextcloud-app/113843 for how to use the built in text editor.

Setting up your own NC instance is a barrier to trying the app. Let's set up a demo NC site so people can try it who aren't already running their own NC.

I'd like to make sure we put a CLEAR warning that any financial info or financial-related files that are posted on the demo site may not be kept private in the event of a site compromise.

When opening https://cloud.pondersource.org/index.php/apps/hledger/ for the first time, I see a 500 error, and:

Return value of HLedger\\HLedger::balanceSheet() must be of the type array, null returned in file '/var/www/html/apps/hledger/vendor/hledger/php-hledger/lib/HLedger.php' line 111

in /var/www/html/data/nextcloud.log

In line 5 of hledger.php you have a TODO comment wondering why autoloading doesn't work for your app.

I suspect that it is a combination of your app installing into /vendor rather than /apps/hledger/ and your name spacing not conforming with the Nextcloud conventions https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/developer_manual/app_development/bootstrap.html.

I post this in a spirit of wanting to help, not as a criticism. I am interested in using your app, but as it stands I won't attempt to install it in case it borks my system in someway due to the unusual install location. Please feel free to correct me if I am mistaken about the install location.

Well done with the work you have done so far, it would be great to be able to install this directly from the Nextcloud app store.

Maybe this belongs in php-hledger but since most of the discussion around this nextcloud app is here, I figured I'd post it here for now.

The main problem is that Nextcloud is installed on MANY different Linux platforms, including Ubuntu, non-ubuntu, older glibc versions, stripped down Linuxes running inside docker, and also on non-intel architectures such as the raspberry pi. Many of these will fail with the current Nextcloud hledger downloader because the current hledger downloader simply downloads the most recently released version of hledger. The current Linux hledger binary that is posted depends on ncurses version 6 and a recent version of glibc, which is not present on Ubuntu versions even as recent as Bionic Beaver 18.04 (3 years old). Somebody may argue that 3 years old is too old to continue supporting but I would argue that MANY potential users may still be on old platforms and they may get frustrated when this app doesn't work there. Additionally, some of the most interesting target users may be running their Nextcloud from a raspberry pi, since that is much easier to setup than a full fledged server, for less technical users. Raspberry pi support is difficult to add since hledger doesn't even publish any official builds for it (it lists some user contributed builds but those are for older versions of hledger). Anyway, just to get the conversation started, I will list a few potential solutions to these problems:

1. Figure out how to build hledger to generate static binaries, which do not depend on any dynamic libraries. Somebody posted a blog post explaining how they build a haskell project to produce static binaries here: https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-09-30-bazel-static-haskell/ I'm not sure if we could replicate that. This would not solve the raspberry PI problem unless we can also get a cross compiler running, in addition to static builds.

2. Setup an automated cross-compiled build for raspberry pi and contribute that to the hledger project so that it can become an official build. As mentioned in the previous bullet point, there would be bonus points if we could get the ARM build to also be a static build, without any external library dependencies.

3. Now this one is a bit different than the first two, but it would be super cool if it works and performs well with a moderate-sized ledger file. Figure out how to build hledger for WASM (web assembly). This would allow hledger to be run inside the web browser or inside a node JS install. I have followed the state of haskell --> WASM compilers for a while and they vary in maturity and maintenance. The best-maintained Haskell --> WASM compiler seems to be Asterius (https://asterius.netlify.app/). According to their roadmap (https://asterius.netlify.app/roadmap.html) they have decent support for various Haskell dependencies and they do support Template Haskell (with certain caveats). Not sure if @simonmichael has heard of anybody trying to compile hledger to WASM using Asterius but if so, that would be super cool. Fun fact, hledger is mentioned in a pkgs.txt file in the root of the Asterius source code (https://github.com/tweag/asterius/blob/master/pkgs.txt), but I'm not sure what that means. Does that mean they've already pre-built hledger into WASM using Asterius? I might try pulling down the Asterius docker image and seeing if hledger comes pre-built in there. Maybe if we're lucky, @TerrorJack from the Asterius project could comment on this.

4. Another potential avenue is compiling Haskell directly to Javascript but this was done with hledger a while back using ghcjs and it did not perform well with large ledger files (understandably). I like the WebAssembly idea above much better, since it is likely to perform the best and produce a smaller distributable file.