Finance Tracker API

A backend REST API for tracking personal financial transactions.
Users can record income and expenses, retrieve transactions, update entries, and delete them. The application is built with Spring Boot, uses PostgreSQL for persistence, and is fully containerized using Docker and Docker Compose.

This project demonstrates backend development, API design, database integration, containerization, and deployment to AWS.

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Features

• Create financial transactions
• Retrieve all transactions
• Retrieve a transaction by ID
• Update existing transactions
• Delete transactions
• PostgreSQL database persistence
• Fully containerized backend with Docker
• Deployment-ready using Docker Compose
• Deployed on AWS EC2

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Tech Stack

Backend

• Java
• Spring Boot
• Spring Data JPA
• REST APIs

Database

• PostgreSQL

Infrastructure & DevOps

• Docker
• Docker Compose
• AWS EC2

Tools

• IntelliJ IDEA
• Postman
• Git / GitHub

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API Endpoints

Base URL:

/api/transactions

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/api/transactions	Get all transactions
GET	/api/transactions/{id}	Get transaction by ID
POST	/api/transactions	Create a new transaction
PUT	/api/transactions/{id}	Update a transaction
DELETE	/api/transactions/{id}	Delete a transaction

Example POST Request

{
  "amount": "50.00",
  "type": "Expense",
  "category": "Food",
  "description": "Chipotle",
  "date": "2026-01-01"
}

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Project Structure

finance-tracker
├── src
│   ├── controller
│   ├── model
│   ├── repository
│   └── service
├── Dockerfile
├── docker-compose.yml
├── pom.xml
└── README.md

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Running the Project Locally

Requirements

• Docker
• Docker Compose

Start the application

docker-compose up --build

This will:

1. Build the Spring Boot application
2. Start the PostgreSQL container
3. Start the backend API container

The API will be available at:

http://localhost:8080

Example endpoint:

http://localhost:8080/api/transactions

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Deployment (AWS EC2)

The application can be deployed to AWS using Docker Compose on an EC2 instance.

Steps

1. Launch an EC2 instance
2. Install Docker
3. Clone the repository
4. Run:

docker-compose up --build -d

The API will then be accessible via:

http://<EC2_PUBLIC_IP>:8080

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Future Improvements

• Transaction categories and filtering
• Monthly spending summaries
• Authentication and user accounts
• Frontend UI for interacting with the API
• CI/CD pipeline for automatic deployments
• HTTPS with Nginx and a custom domain

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Author

Elias Nemiri