Would you like to have your own wesabe service running on a virtual computer? Read on to see how you can set up your own service in the Amazon cloud.

I was saddened to hear from Wesabe last month that the company would be discontinuing it’s services. This was bad news to the seemingly large userbase, but fortunately they promissed to make their software open source.

Wesabe was one of the few Online PFMs (Personal Finance Manager) that fit my criteria of supporting manual data upload and working with non-US currency. It was almost perfect for my use, even though it didn’t handle transaction tagging quite the way I wanted (I want to be able to set up regex rules for transaction tagging).

Now that Wesabes source code has been availabe for a few d ays I decided to see if I could run it as a cloud service through Amazon EC2. This turned out to be quite easy.  so here is a brief step-by-step guide. You’ll need an account with Amazon before you start (if you’ve ever bought books from amazon, you probably have one already).

Step 1 - Sign up for Amazon Web Services EC2

Step 2 – Find and start a virtual computer (instance) running Ubuntu 10.04 , preferably an EBS backed image. I used an image called “ami-03765c77″. Generate a keypair during instance setup and click “edit firewall” on the confirmation page to open up TCP port 3000 to all hosts (0.0.0.0/0).

Step 3 - Connect to your virtual server via SSH. In the Amazon EC2 controlpanel, right-click the instance and select “Connect” to see IP address and the SSH syntax.

Step 4 - From the virtual server, download the install-script for the Wesabe sources: http://github.com/nylen/openwesabe-installer

Step 5 - Run the script. When asked for values just go with the default values from the script (except perhaps the MySQL db password)

Step 6 – Set the startup script for wesabe to run automatically at boot (warning: cannot be run as root)

Step 7 - Finished! Point your browser to http://<ip>:3000 and sign into your own private Wesabe service!

Step 8 - Use AWS to save your running instance as a new image. Right-click your image, and select “Create image (EBS AMI)”.