Budget Buddy

Team Members

Jasmine Zhu Athena Luo Esther Feng Zeba Shafi Harrison

Product vision statement

Our app Budget Buddy, empowers users to plan and track spending on mobile quickly and clearly by showing planned vs. actual amounts per category, so they can make smarter day-to-day money decisions.

User stories

• Full Project Backlog (Issues)

Steps necessary to run the software

0. Set up docker

install and run docker desktop create a dockerhub account

1. Create and activate a virtual environment

First, make sure you have Python and pipenv installed.

Run in your terminal:
pip install pipenv

Second, create and activate a virtual environment for this project:
pipenv shell

Your terminal should now show a prefix like (2-web-app-bytesized) — this means you’re inside the environment.

Third, install all the project dependencies from the requirements file:
pipenv install -r requirements.txt

To verify everything installed correctly, you can check:
pip freeze

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2. Set up environment variables

First, copy the example environment file to create your own local configuration:
cp env.example .env

Second, open .env and edit it to include your database name and MongoDB URI. For example:

MONGO_DBNAME=example MONGO_URI="mongodb://admin:secret@mongodb:27017/?authSource=admin" FLASK_APP=app.py FLASK_ENV=development FLASK_PORT=5000

⚠️ The .env file must not be pushed to GitHub, as it contains private credentials.
Only commit env.example with dummy values. if you use a database, you should change the URI to

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3. Run the app using Docker Compose

The easiest way to launch both the Flask web server and MongoDB is through Docker Compose.

First, build and start the containers:
docker compose up --build

If you encounter a “port already in use” error, stop any previous containers first:
docker compose down ， then change the ports number in the docker-compose.yml then rerun the previous command.

Once it builds successfully, open a web browser and go to:
http://localhost:5002

You should see the running Flask web app connected to MongoDB.

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4. Stop the app

To shut down the containers:
docker compose down

If you also want to remove MongoDB data volumes (for a clean reset):
docker compose down --volumes

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Task boards

• Sprint 1 Board
• Sprint 2 Board