Hforecast
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Installation

Hforecast is a Haskell program built with Stack. It produces hledger journals, and the queries throughout these docs use the hledger CLI — so you’ll want both.

Prerequisites

  • Stack — the Haskell build tool. Install it from haskellstack.org (or via your package manager). Stack fetches the right GHC compiler automatically on first build.
  • hledger (recommended) — to query the output. Install from hledger.org/install. Hforecast writes a standard journal, so any recent hledger works.

Build

From the repository root:

stack build

The first build compiles all dependencies and can take a while; later builds are incremental. The executable lands under .stack-work/; run it through Stack with:

stack exec hforecast -- -c examples/casual.yaml -o hforecast.journal

Install onto your PATH

To put a hforecast binary on your PATH (Stack installs to ~/.local/bin by default — make sure it’s on your PATH):

stack install

Then run it directly:

hforecast -c examples/casual.yaml -o hforecast.journal

Install the tax data

Tax brackets are read at run time from your config directory, not compiled in. Install the bundled files and download the all-states dataset with:

make install-taxes

This copies the bracket YAMLs from examples/taxes/ and downloads the state income-tax dataset (from LevyIO, CC BY 4.0) into:

${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/hforecast/taxes/

where hforecast auto-discovers them. Pass ARGS=--force to overwrite existing files. You can skip this entirely if you only use a flat effectiveRate, or point at bracket files by path in your config. See Taxes for the details.

Verify 

hforecast -c examples/minimal.yaml

You should see a small hledger journal on stdout. If instead you get a Config error: or a non-zero exit, the message on stderr says what went wrong. Next, follow the quickstart.

See also