Tasker

A personal, capture-first task manager for desktop and mobile. It includes a calendar with a subscribable ICS feed, Kanban boards, projects, priorities and deadlines. The design rule throughout: adding a task must feel like typing a bullet list.

Today: overdue items, a mixed list across projects, and every setting in the details panel	Kanban: drag cards between To do, Doing and Done
Calendar: drag unscheduled tasks onto a day; deadlines are flagged	Projects: nested outlines, in light and dark mode

How the features stay out of the way

Idea	What it means
Capture is an outliner	Enter starts the next line. Tab / Shift+Tab indent and outdent to make subtasks. Pasting a bulleted or indented list creates the whole tree. There are no forms.
The page fills in the details	A task typed on a project page lands in that project. On Today it is planned for today, on a calendar day for that day, and in a Kanban column it gets that status. Subtasks follow their parent's project.
Optional inline shortcuts	Shortcuts such as fri, !!, #project and due 17.10 are applied only when you press Enter. They are removed from the title and confirmed in a message with Undo. Text that doesn't parse stays as text.
Settings live elsewhere	Every option sits in the details panel (Shift+Enter, or the › on a line). It is a side panel on desktop and a bottom sheet on mobile.
Sort later, if ever	The Inbox has an optional Process mode that steps through tasks one at a time with single keys (p project, t/m/w date, 1–3 priority, Enter next).
Capture from anywhere	Press n on desktop or the + on mobile. Tasks are filed into the page you're on. On a phone, text shared to Tasker from other apps lands in the Inbox.

Typing shortcuts

These work in English and German.

Type	Result
tomorrow, fri, next week, 17.10, 17 oct, in 3 days (at the end of a line)	Planned date
at 10, 14:00, 9am, um 14 uhr	Time; the planned date defaults to today
due fri, by 17.10, bis freitag, ^fri, due:17.10	Deadline
!, !!, !!! (or p3, p2, p1)	Priority low / medium / high
#health	Existing project (a unique prefix is enough)
@fri, @14:00	Date or time anywhere in the line

Press ? in the app for all keyboard shortcuts.

Running it

Development

npm install
cp .env.example .env        # DATABASE_URL=data/tasker.db, TASKER_PASSWORD empty = no login
npm run dev

To try it with sample data, run node scripts/seed-demo.mjs http://localhost:5173 against a running instance with login disabled. To regenerate the README screenshots, run node scripts/screenshots.mjs <url> against a seeded instance.

The database file and its migrations are created automatically on start. After changing src/lib/server/db/schema.ts, run npm run db:generate to add a migration.

Docker (self-hosted)

echo "TASKER_PASSWORD=choose-something-long" > .env
docker compose up -d --build

• Data is stored in the tasker-data volume at /data/tasker.db.
• The container is published on 127.0.0.1:19270 only. Put nginx in front of it with TLS: HTTPS is required for installing the PWA, for the service worker and for secure cookies.

nginx

deploy/nginx/tasker.conf is a ready-to-use site config. It provides:

• HTTP→HTTPS redirect, with ACME challenges for certbot
• HTTP/2 and HSTS
• rate limiting on /login
• a no-cache rule for the service worker
• no access logging for the calendar feed, whose URL contains the secret token

sudo cp deploy/nginx/tasker.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/tasker.conf
sudo sed -i 's/tasks.example.com/your.domain/g' /etc/nginx/conf.d/tasker.conf
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/certbot
# First certificate: comment out the 443 server block, reload nginx, then:
sudo certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/certbot -d your.domain
sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

nginx must forward X-Forwarded-Proto and X-Forwarded-Host, as the config does. Without them, SvelteKit rejects the login form as a cross-site request.

Variable	Purpose
DATABASE_URL	SQLite file path (default /data/tasker.db in the container)
TASKER_PASSWORD	Login password for the single user. Changing it signs out every session.
PROTOCOL_HEADER, HOST_HEADER	adapter-node settings for running behind a proxy

Calendar feed

Settings → Calendar feed has a subscription link for all tasks and one per project.

• Planned tasks appear as all-day events.
• Planned tasks with a time appear as 30-minute blocks, in the subscriber's local time.
• Deadlines appear as ⚑ all-day events.
• Completed tasks are left out.

Anyone with a link can read the feed. Reset links revokes all of them.

Phone

Open the site and choose Add to Home Screen. The app keeps working briefly offline: changes are queued on the device and synced when the connection returns.

Architecture

• SvelteKit 3 (Svelte 5 runes) with adapter-node, Tailwind 4, and SQLite through Drizzle and better-sqlite3.
• src/lib/client/store.svelte.ts is the client-side source of truth. Every change is applied locally first, then queued as an op (task.upsert, task.update, …) and flushed to POST /api/ops. The queue is coalesced and kept in localStorage, so offline edits survive a reload.
• src/lib/components/Outliner.svelte is the single capture component. Inbox, Today, Upcoming, projects, calendar days, the details panel and quick capture all use it, each with its own filter and defaults.
• Pure, unit-tested logic:
  • src/lib/tokens.ts: the inline shortcut parser
  • src/lib/paste.ts: list to tree
  • src/lib/ics.ts: the RFC 5545 writer
• Ordering uses fractional index keys:
  • sortKey orders siblings in lists.
  • boardKey orders cards within a Kanban column.

Tests

npm run test:unit -- --run   # parser, paste, ICS
npm run test:e2e             # Playwright: capture, paste, tokens, Kanban + calendar drag, ICS feed