1 BlueChips is a simple finance tracking application designed for small groups of
2 people with shared expenses. It was designed and developed by groups of
3 students who got tired of the headaches of managing lots of little payments
9 1. Larry lives with Curly and Moe.
10 2. Larry gets the utility bill, and enters it as an expenditure on
11 their BlueChips site. Everyone shares the utilities, so it's just an
13 3. A week later, Moe pays the rent. Curly has a smaller room, so he
14 pays a smaller fraction of the rent.
15 4. At any time, any user can visit the BlueChips site and see who
16 needs to pay who how much in order to settle the books.
17 5. After a few months, Moe has paid for a disproportionate amount of
18 stuff, so the other roommates each make a transfer to Moe, and
19 enter the amounts in BlueChips.
24 * Support for negative expenses
25 * Uses any authentication mechanism which can set the REMOTE_USER
26 environment variable, including authentication modules supported by
27 Apache, nginx, lighttpd, and others.
28 * Email notifications of changes (optional)
31 Installation and Setup
32 ----------------------
34 Install ``BlueChips`` using easy_install::
36 easy_install BlueChips
38 Make a config file as follows::
40 paster make-config BlueChips config.ini
42 Tweak the config file as appropriate and then setup the application::
44 paster setup-app config.ini
46 Host the application behind an authentication layer which sets REMOTE_USER.
51 The recommended deployment platform for BlueChips is Apache, mod_wsgi, and any
52 Apache module which provides authentication. Here is an example vhost
55 <VirtualHost bluechips.example.com:80>
56 ServerName bluechips.example.com
58 WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/bluechips.wsgi
66 AuthName "Example BlueChips Site"
67 AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/passwords
72 The ``bluechips.wsgi`` wrapper script looks just like::
74 from paste.deploy import loadapp
75 application = loadapp('config:/var/www/ssl/config.ini')
80 BlueChips is the latest in a long line of software to make managing
81 group finances easier, and would not be possible without the
82 intellectual inspiration of those predecessors.
84 CUTCAT's `accounting software`_ started the trend of
85 software-based accounting mechanisms. It inspired a re-implementation
86 as a curses script by `Nelson Elhage`_, which introduced the
87 notion of "pushing expenditures" to simplify transfers. The algorithm
88 used in BlueChips for settling the books is directly cargo-culted from
89 Nelson's implementation.
91 .. _accounting software: http://cutc.at/accounting-software.html
92 .. _Nelson Elhage: http://nelhage.com/