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 If you want to try out BlueChips, you can go to http://demo.bluechi.ps
14 1. Larry lives with Curly and Moe.
15 2. Larry gets the utility bill, and enters it as an expenditure on
16 their BlueChips site. Everyone shares the utilities, so it's just an
18 3. A week later, Moe pays the rent. Curly has a smaller room, so he
19 pays a smaller fraction of the rent.
20 4. At any time, any user can visit the BlueChips site and see who
21 needs to pay who how much in order to settle the books.
22 5. After a few months, Moe has paid for a disproportionate amount of
23 stuff, so the other roommates each make a transfer to Moe, and
24 enter the amounts in BlueChips.
29 * Support for negative expenses
30 * Uses any authentication mechanism which can set the REMOTE_USER
31 environment variable, including authentication modules supported by
32 Apache, nginx, lighttpd, and others.
33 * Email notifications of changes (optional)
36 Installation and Setup
37 ----------------------
39 Install ``BlueChips`` using easy_install::
41 easy_install BlueChips
43 Make a config file as follows::
45 paster make-config BlueChips config.ini
47 Tweak the config file as appropriate and then setup the application::
49 paster setup-app config.ini
51 Host the application behind an authentication layer which sets REMOTE_USER.
56 The recommended deployment platform for BlueChips is Apache, mod_wsgi, and any
57 Apache module which provides authentication. Here is an example vhost
60 <VirtualHost bluechips.example.com:80>
61 ServerName bluechips.example.com
63 WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/bluechips.wsgi
71 AuthName "Example BlueChips Site"
72 AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/passwords
77 The ``bluechips.wsgi`` wrapper script looks just like::
79 from paste.deploy import loadapp
80 application = loadapp('config:/var/www/ssl/config.ini')
85 BlueChips is the latest in a long line of software to make managing
86 group finances easier, and would not be possible without the
87 intellectual inspiration of those predecessors.
89 CUTCAT's `accounting software`_ started the trend of
90 software-based accounting mechanisms. It inspired a re-implementation
91 as a curses script by `Nelson Elhage`_, which introduced the
92 notion of "pushing expenditures" to simplify transfers. The algorithm
93 used in BlueChips for settling the books is directly cargo-culted from
94 Nelson's implementation.
96 .. _accounting software: http://cutc.at/accounting-software.html
97 .. _Nelson Elhage: http://nelhage.com/