Oracle Cloud (free tier)¶

Oracle Cloud's "Always Free" ARM Ampere VMs work great for the importer — but the network egress to Israeli banks is slow enough that default scraper timeouts trip up Amex, Isracard, and Visa Cal. This guide documents the tuning that's reliably worked.

Provision the VM¶

• Ampere A1 (ARM): 2 OCPU / 12 GB RAM free tier is plenty.
• Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 LTS.
• Open the inbound port for Actual Budget UI (e.g. 5006) only to your IP — or skip it and reverse-proxy via Cloudflare Tunnel.

Install Docker¶

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y docker.io docker-compose-plugin
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
exit && ssh ...   # reconnect for group membership

Tune per-bank scraper¶

The default timeout of 30 000 ms is too tight from many Oracle Cloud regions to Israeli WAFs. Set higher per-bank values for the heaviest banks:

"amex": {
  "id": "...",
  "card6Digits": "...",
  "password": "...",
  "timeout": 60000,
  "daysBack": 14,
  "targets": [...]
},
"isracard": {
  "id": "...",
  "card6Digits": "...",
  "password": "...",
  "timeout": 60000,
  "daysBack": 14,
  "targets": [...]
},
"visaCal": {
  "username": "...",
  "password": "...",
  "timeout": 60000,
  "daysBack": 14,
  "targets": [...]
}

Rate limiting¶

Increase the inter-bank delay to give the IP some quiet time between scrapes — Oracle Cloud public IPs sometimes look bot-ish to Israeli bank WAFs:

"delayBetweenBanks": 5000

Resources¶

ARM Ampere has plenty of RAM but limited single-thread performance. Camoufox is happy on Ampere; expect each bank to take 20–40 % longer than on x86. Allow that in your SCHEDULE cadence — every 8 hours is comfortable; every 2 hours back-to-back is risky.

See also¶

• Bank options — scraper tuning
• Rate limiting
• Troubleshooting