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Local Installation

The easiest way to get Actual running locally is to use the actual-server project.

Actual Server is the server element of Actual that is used for syncing changes across devices, and it comes with the latest version of Actual Web.

Pre-requisites​

Actual Server currently requires at least Node.js v18. If you don’t have Node.js installed, you can download the latest version of Node.js from the Node.js website (we recommend downloading the “LTS” version). Consider using a tool like nvm or asdf to install and manage multiple versions of Node.js.

You’ll also need to have Git installed. The Git website has instructions for all supported operating systems.

Next, you’ll need to install yarn, which is the package manager that Actual uses. You can install it using the following command:

npm install --global yarn

Installing Actual​

First you need to clone the Actual Server project to your machine, you can do this using Git.

git clone https://github.com/actualbudget/actual-server.git

Once you have it cloned, navigate to the directory where you cloned the project

cd actual-server

Install all the dependencies using yarn

yarn install

Running Actual​

Now that Actual is installed, start the server by running the following command:

yarn start

Note that if you restart your computer, you’ll have to run this command again to start the server.

Accessing Actual​

You should now be able to visit Actual by going to http://localhost:5006 in your browser.

When first accessing Actual, you may be prompted to provide a URL for the server. For a local installation like this, you can click the “Use localhost:5006” button to use the same URL as the one you’re accessing Actual from.

Updating Actual​

When we publish a new release, you’ll need to follow these steps to update:

  1. Stop the server if it’s running. You can use the keyboard shortcut
    Ctrl
    C
    (even on macOS) to stop the server, or close the terminal window it’s running from.
  2. Run git pull from the directory you cloned the project into. This will download the latest server code.
  3. Run yarn install from that same directory. This will download the latest web client code, along with any updated dependencies for the server.
  4. Restart the server by running yarn start.