How to Install and Use Midday: A Freelancer's Guide 💻

Sunday, Dec 15, 2024 | 7 minute read

GitHub Trend

This innovative tool offers a comprehensive management solution tailored for freelancers, integrating time, financial tracking, invoicing, and document storage into one easy-to-use platform. Its user-friendly design is perfect for non-tech-savvy individuals. 🚀📊

“In the freelance world, management is the key to success.” 🎯

In today’s fast-paced work environment, freelancers are facing increasing challenges. With the rise of online work platforms and remote collaboration, effectively managing time, finances, and resources has become a pressing issue for every freelancer. 🌐 📊 This is where Midday comes in! Designed to provide freelancers with a powerful management solution, it enables them to tackle various work challenges more efficiently.

Midday is an all-in-one management tool specifically created for freelancers, contractors, consultants, and independent business owners. ✨ Its goal is to simplify complicated business operations by consolidating functionalities scattered across multiple platforms into a single, cohesive system, significantly boosting work efficiency. 🤩 With Midday, users can devote more time and energy to important core tasks, bidding farewell to tedious management duties! Plus, its design philosophy deeply prioritizes user experience, ensuring that even those who aren’t tech-savvy can easily navigate the tool, truly embodying a user-centered approach! 📈

🌟 Key Features of Midday Revealed 🧰

Midday boasts numerous unique features to help users manage their businesses efficiently and conveniently. Here are some standout characteristics:

1. Financial Management 💵: Seamlessly connects with over 20,000 banks, allowing users to easily access a unified currency overview of all their accounts, keeping a clear track of cash flow.

2. Invoicing System 🧾: Quickly generates professional invoices, including VAT, sales tax, discounts, and custom logos, enhancing invoicing efficiency and freeing you from complicated invoice processing.

3. Time Tracking ⏱️: Monitors project duration, enabling users to bill accurately based on recorded hours, optimizing the billing process.

4. Magic Inbox 📫: Users can set up a dedicated email address for invoices and receipts, which will be automatically saved in a secure vault for easy financial tracking and management.

5. Secure Vault 🔒: A central storage for important documents like contracts and agreements, ensuring secure storage and effortless management through automatic categorization, making file archiving simpler.

6. Workflow Automation ⚙️: Automates month-end processes, reducing manual workload, making it easy to prepare materials needed for accounting.

7. Midday Assistant 🤖: Interact with a smart assistant to gain financial insights, such as understanding burn rates, finding specific receipts or invoices, letting you keep everything under control.

🚀 Why Developers Prefer Midday: Reasons to Choose It 👐

Why are developers flocking to Midday? It boils down to several key factors:

1. Open Source 🌐: Midday is an open-source project, allowing developers to freely view, use, and modify the code. 🛠️ This freedom fosters innovation and personalized customization, greatly enhancing the user experience.

2. Community-Driven Development 🤝: Midday emphasizes community involvement, continuously refining its features through collective input, enhancing user interactions, and forming a robust usage ecosystem.

3. Modern Solutions 🚀: Unlike traditional accounting software like Quickbooks and Xero, Midday’s design better aligns with the needs of modern freelancers, integrating multiple necessary functions into one platform, making it hassle-free.

Midday helps users focus on their core business with its efficient toolkit rather than wasting time on management tasks. Its design and features stem from the real needs of freelancers, ensuring it provides solutions that fit seamlessly into their workflows and promotes healthy business growth. 🌱

🛠️ Installing Midday

To start using Midday, you’ll need to install it in your local environment. The process is super simple; just open your terminal and run the following command:

curl -sL https://go.midday.ai/d | tar -xz

Here, the curl command downloads the Midday installation file from the specified URL, while tar -xz decompresses the downloaded file. Make sure that you have the necessary command-line tools like curl and tar installed on your system before running this command. ✨

• The -sL option means curl will run silently (without printing progress) and will automatically follow redirects.
• The -x in the tar command is for extracting files, and -z indicates that it’s handling gzip-compressed files.

Once the installation is complete, you can start happily using Midday for development! 🎈

📚 Usage Examples

Next, we’ll explore some common usage scenarios and code examples to help you understand how to use Midday better.

🚀 Example 1: Starting the Development Server

After installing Midday, you need to start the development server to see the live application. Use the command below to easily start the server:

npm run dev

In this command, npm is the package manager for the Node.js ecosystem, and run dev is a predefined script command. After executing this command, you’ll start a local development server in the current directory.

• With the development server, you can see code changes in real-time without manually refreshing the browser every time.
• Typically, this server runs on the default localhost:3000 port, which you can access via your browser to see your application in action. 🌍

🛠️ Example 2: Creating a Database Table

Next, Midday integrates with Supabase, making database operations easy. Use the below code snippet to create a new database table:

const { createClient } = require('@supabase/supabase-js');

// Connect to Supabase
const supabaseUrl = 'your-supabase-url';
const supabaseKey = 'your-anon-key';
const supabase = createClient(supabaseUrl, supabaseKey);

// Create a new table
async function createTable() {
  const { data, error } = await supabase
    .from('your_table_name')
    .create({
      column1: 'value1',
      column2: 'value2',
    });

  if (error) {
    console.error('Error creating table:', error);
  } else {
    console.log('Table created successfully:', data);
  }
}

createTable();

In this code snippet, we first import the Supabase client and then use the createClient function to connect to a specified Supabase instance. Be sure to replace your-supabase-url and your-anon-key with your own Supabase configuration details.

• The createTable function attempts to create a new table. The from method specifies the name of the table, and the create method is used to insert data.
• The if statement checks for errors, and any error messages will be printed in the console to help you diagnose issues.

📬 Example 3: Sending Notifications

If your application needs to send notifications to users, you can utilize the Novu service. Here’s a simple example of sending notifications:

import { Novu } from '@novu/node';

const novu = new Novu('your-api-key');

async function sendNotification() {
  const notification = await novu.trigger('notification-template', {
    to: [{ subscriberId: 'user-id' }],
    payload: {
      title: 'Hello!',
      message: 'This is a notification from Midday.'
    },
  });

  console.log('Notification sent:', notification);
}

sendNotification();

In this example, we first create an instance of the Novu client using the API key. The sendNotification function implements the notification functionality:

• The trigger method activates a specific notification template that you can define differently.
• Replace your-api-key and user-id with the actual API key and user identifier to send the notification to the specified user.

🚀 Example 4: Setting Up CI/CD

To establish Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD), you can use GitHub Actions. Below is an example code for setting up a ci.yml file:

name: CI

on:
  push:
    branches: 
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Set up Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v2
        with:
          node-version: '16'

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm install

      - name: Run build
        run: npm run build

In this configuration file:

• Whenever you push code to the main branch, the CI process will be triggered.
• In the jobs section, we specify that the tasks will run in the ubuntu-latest environment.
• This code comprises several steps, including checking out code, setting up the Node.js environment, installing dependencies, and running the build.

By following these steps, you ensure that every code commit is automatically tested and deployed, significantly enhancing development efficiency and project quality. ⚙️

With these example scenarios, you should have a better understanding of how to use Midday and leverage its integrations with other services to simplify your development process. I hope these codes and examples help you get started quickly on your development journey! 🎉