hledger/doc/ANNOUNCE

I'm very pleased to announce hledger 1.5.
A big thank you to the release contributors: 
Dmitry Astapov,
Mykola Orliuk,
Eli Flanagan,
Elijah Caine,
Sam Jeeves,
Matthias Kauer,
Hans-Peter Deifel,
Mick Dekkers,
Nadrieril,
Alvaro Fernando García.

The next major release is scheduled for 2018/03/31.

What is hledger ?
-----------------

hledger (http://hledger.org) is an evolving, reliable, cross-platform
program for tracking money, time, or any other commodity, using
double-entry accounting and a simple plain text file format.  It is a
haskell reimplementation of Ledger and the plain text accounting
concept, providing command-line, curses and web interfaces. hledger
aims to be a pleasant and practical tool for personal, business or
institutional finance and time tracking.

What's new ?
------------

The full release notes are at http://hledger.org/release-notes#hledger-1.5 .
Some highlights:

* Ledger-style automated posting rules to modify transactions, enabled
  with --auto flag

* Ledger-style periodic transaction rules to generate forecast
  transactions (--forecast) and budget goals

* a new budget report (balance --budget) comparing amounts with
  per-period and per-account budget goals

* more expressive period expressions

* space can be used as digit group separator character in numbers

* commodity or default commodity directives give more control over
  display precision and decimal point/digit group separator


Getting started
---------------

See http://hledger.org/download for all install methods.
Windows users can download nightly binaries.
On other platforms, you may need to build the latest release yourself.
The easiest and most reliable way is to run the hledger install script. 
This requires only bash and will install the hledger tools in $HOME/.local/bin/.
(It uses an installed cabal or stack if possible, otherwise installs
stack and GHC in $HOME/.local/bin and $HOME/.stack/).
Here's the responsible way to run it:

$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonmichael/hledger/master/hledger-install/hledger-install.sh
$ less hledger-install.sh # (do security review)
$ bash hledger-install.sh # (add -v for more detail; use bash -x to show commands being run)

or the more convenient, less secure way:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonmichael/hledger/master/hledger-install/hledger-install.sh | bash

or, to install individual tools:

$ stack install hledger-1.5  # hledger-ui-1.5 hledger-web-1.5 hledger-api-1.5 etc.

or:

$ cabal update
$ cabal install hledger-1.5  # hledger-ui-1.5 hledger-web-1.5 hledger-api-1.5 etc.

Note: building haskell apps can take significant time, memory, and disk space, especially the first time.
You can kill and restart the installer without losing progress. 
If it fails, please help us improve it by reporting the full output.

After installation, ensure $HOME/.local/bin is in your $PATH. 
Now try some commands:

$ hledger -h            # quick help
$ hledger help          # list built-in manuals
$ hledger add           # record some transactions
$ hledger               # list available commands

Now perhaps work through the tutorial at http://hledger.org/step-by-step.html

Or review the fine documents, presentations etc. at http://hledger.org
and http://plaintextaccounting.org

Or say hello and ask questions in the #hledger IRC channel on Freenode:
http://irc.hledger.org

If you have been finding hledger useful, I invite you to become a
sponsor or donor to make it stronger (see home page).
Also give feedback, report bugs, send pull requests, write about it,
etc. Thanks for your help!

-Simon