hledger Discourse Plugin
Render hledger journal reports inside Discourse topics.
Put an hledger journal in a fenced hledger code block in a topic's first
post. The block is replaced by a dashboard with five reports, generated live
by the hledger command line tool:
- 📋 Accounts and balances (a full account tree, each name capitalized)
- ⚖️ Balance sheet (indented account tree under each section)
- 📈 Profit & loss / P&L (indented account tree under each section)
- 👥 Equity distribution (account tree with per-commodity shares; contributed capital, not legal ownership)
- 🧾 Journal (a detailed transaction log: date, description and postings)
Installation
Follow the plugin installation guide.
The plugin requires the hledger executable on the server. Install it with
your package manager (for example apt-get install hledger) and point the
hledger path site setting at it if it is not on the default PATH.
Docker development environment
Inside the Discourse dev container, install the plugin's system dependencies (hledger, Chromium and the Playwright browser used by the test suite) with:
docker exec -u root discourse_dev bash /src/plugins/hledger/bin/setup-dev
How to use
-
Enable the plugin under
Admin > Settings > Plugins(hledger enabled). -
Add an hledger journal to the first post of a topic:
```hledger 2024-01-01 Opening balances assets:bank:checking 1000.00 EUR equity:alice -600.00 EUR equity:bob -400.00 EUR ``` -
The code block is replaced by the report dashboard. Reports can be filtered by a start and end date; the end date is inclusive.
Reports are generated on demand and cached per post revision, so editing the journal refreshes them.
Account names can reference Discourse users: a path segment written as
@username (for example equity:@alice) is rendered as a mention link, with the
same profile card as mentions in posts. Only segments matching an existing user
are linked; anything else stays plain text.
Security
Journals are untrusted input. The plugin runs hledger with a scrubbed
environment, a private working directory, a hard timeout, resource limits and
an output cap, and it rejects include directives so a journal cannot read
arbitrary server files.
Development
# Ruby specs (run `bin/setup-dev` first for the integration specs)
bin/rspec plugins/hledger/spec/lib plugins/hledger/spec/requests
bin/rspec plugins/hledger/spec/system
# Frontend tests
DISCOURSE_DISABLE_BROWSER_SANDBOX=1 bin/qunit plugins/hledger/test/javascripts
License
MIT
Contact
E-Mail, Chat, Social, Lightning: raucao@kosmos.org