Actual Budget: How to Fix Infinite Loading Spinner

Why hidden errors are confusing

I was just trying to make Actual Budget work. It’s a nifty budgeting app which offers a very easy Docker installation, unlike pretty much all other budgeting apps (looking at you, Firefly III). Unfortrunately, after I installed it, I got hit by this:

An empty screen with an infinite loading spinner. What now?

Looking For a Solution

I looked up “Actual Budget Infinite Loading Spinner“ and “Actual Budget Stuck Loading Spinner“, both on Google and Kagi, but “Actual Budget“ is such a generic name, which can also be taken literally, that no useful results showed up.

The repo recommends joining the Discord and asking questions there, but I have social anxiety, so I’d prefer not to do that.

Getting Closer…

I always browse the web using Safari, which tends to have a pretty good support for web technologies nowadays, so I thought that this would be a problem in all browsers. However, as I exhausted all my other options, I tried opening the page in Firefox.

And wouldn’t you know, that at least showed an error:

The documentation for Actual Budget is surprisingly good for an open-source project, so after I followed the link, I found out what the problem was.

The Solution

Turns out that in order to access the app, you need to use HTTPS. So after I did that, it started working fine!