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Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

vikunja.io

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

#21
I’ve been a paying Todoist customer for many years. For some reason, they steadfastly refuse to introduce blocking/blocked by flags.

It seems so strange to me to do all the hard work of allowing arbitrarily nested projects and tasks, sub-tasks, labels, complex filters and collaboration, but then not do dependencies. Imo dependencies is the big difference between something you can use on complex projects, and a “mere” to-do list - even one with nested projects, labels, filters, whatever.

I thought that perhaps I wanted a Gantt chart tool and spent a couple of months going down that route. At least in my experience, though, what I actually wanted was just some way to establish a DAG - I didn’t even necessarily need a way to visualise it, just the ability to group and filter on it.

Vikunja looks interesting - open source, self-hosted and supports dependencies/relations. No iOS mobile client at this time, though.

Re: Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

#23
post #6

I miss the days where app installation was just "unzip, edit the config file, upload to your web server and hit up the install page". Now it's all Docker and gulp and build and urgh soooo complicated.

I host tens of self-hosted apps for various purposes, including ones similar to this one, all via docker-compose. Setting up new ones is a breeze (thanks to Traefik), backing up the configuration and data is trivial, upgrading to the latest version takes a few minutes at most. I’m confident my workflow is simpler and more convenient than yours. Granted, the initial investment to learn and understand the tools is pret…

Any chance you could outline your process? E.g. if you had to start from a new VM, what all would you need to do?

I've always just set everything up via the command line, and it's tedious/not repeatable (and there's also no isolation). I'm sure there's a better way, but usually the solutions I see involve gluing together a bunch of different tools--possibly even more work than I'm already doing (although there are benefits!).

Re: Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

#24
post #8
post #6

I miss the days where app installation was just "unzip, edit the config file, upload to your web server and hit up the install page". Now it's all Docker and gulp and build and urgh soooo complicated.

Couldn't agree more! The real irony is that usually it's sold as "Docker makes installing, upgrading and maintaining easier."

Running an arbitrary thing in Docker is far easier than without it. If I want to run the PHP/MySQL-based Matomo, I can just grab the ready-made docker-compose.yml [0] and tell my main nginx to proxy_pass onto it. I don’t need to figure out how to configure MySQL/MariaDB/PHP-FPM and what hacks did my distro introduce to it (at least I’m not using Debian/Ubuntu, so there shouldn’t be that many). Similarly, I can get Zulip in Docker [1] (even if it’s apparently in alpha state) and not mess with the Python packaging trainwreck, and also setting up all of Redis, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ and memcached.

[0]: https://github.com/matomo-org/docker/tree/master/.examples/n...

[1]: https://github.com/zulip/docker-zulip

Re: Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

#25
post #6

I miss the days where app installation was just "unzip, edit the config file, upload to your web server and hit up the install page". Now it's all Docker and gulp and build and urgh soooo complicated.

Docker is crazy simple, I love it.

Docker is crazy simple if everything works as it should. Otherwise it can be crazy not-simple.

Re: Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

#27
post #5

Funny. I just stumbled upon this yesterday. The only thing that I wish to see improved is having the backend serve the frontend from the same docker container. It's a bit of a hassle to use nginx as a proxy in the docker compose setup (or in fact set all of that up on my Synology NAS).

Initially I was also interested in this. There is the staticpath option in the backend config. You can point it to the directory of the frontend files. Theoretically, both the backend and the frontend could be served by the builtin webserver. Unfortunately, for this to work most frontend URLs must get rewritten/rerouted to /index.html and this does not seem to be implemented. Shouldn't be too complicated though.

Re: Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

#28
I'm biased.

I'm making a tool that's kind of like this one. Please keep that in mind, because I'm about to give a whole bunch of criticism here.

First things first, the UX and UI is really neat and there's lots of really good design and thought put into how fast the app is and how well it is handling a whole bunch of users. I was sitting in there with everyone in hacker news creating tasks and it was keeping up amazingly.

But my first impression using this is that it's going to need a lot more work on the depth of the features rather than the breath. It looks sleek and it's got lots of options on a task, but when you click through one of the options they are very bare bones. There is a depth of interaction that is missing.

One example, I click on the time to task option, and it gives me an option for repetition, but repetition comes in the form of day month or year. What happens if I want something to repeat every Tuesday, or every second month on the 5th? You just can't do it. You can repeat tasks, but because it's not powerful enough it's a system that's not going to be useful in a lot of cases. Taking my trash out happens every Tuesday. If I were to want to abandon my current system to use this app I would no longer be able to do that.

Another thing that struck me was the percentage/progress option. When I click the progress box I got a drop down list with increments of 10 which i could pick from. That was way less than I was expecting from a feature like that.

I have two criticisms here. The first is that I expected a progress system to be something of a system. Imagine having progress that is tied to the number of check boxes I've checked off, something that's not another manual thing that I have to click and keep track of.

But if it's going to just be a number entry, why is it only a number entry for progress? This could have been part of a bigger more powerful system that I can use to fit my needs. I'm not thinking "oh hey look I can keep it percentage", I'm more thinking "oh hey look I can't keep track of the amount of money I spent this week". Something as plain as a drop down with a bunch of numbers should never be a dedicated feature.

Percentage option doesn't hurt, but when you add little features like that instead of bigger systems, you're going to find that you get lots of people wanting to add new little features to fit their use cases. This will especially be true when the app is open source and everyone has the ability to go in and add that on their own.

Final criticism. There's a little bit of a disconnect in how you add a lot of stuff to a task. Take relations as an example. I click add relation, and nothing happens. I sit confused for a while, until I notice that the related tasks has already appeared in the main task window and now I need to click the plus in order to start creating a relationship.

All of those options in the right side bar which open items in the left sidebar could be in the left side bar from the start. When I click that button that starts the addition of relations to a task the app should start a process where I am now creating a relation, not popping up a new section. This way you have a direct connection between where I clicked to add a new thing, and the process for adding that new thing.

Everything I say here can be easily fixed, so it's not at all the end of the world. Don't take this as me saying the app is bad, but there are a lot of flaws here that make me hesitant to throw away what I've worked on.

Re: Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

#29

I’ve been a paying Todoist customer for many years. For some reason, they steadfastly refuse to introduce blocking/blocked by flags. It seems so strange to me to do all the hard work of allowing arbitrarily nested projects and tasks, sub-tasks, labels, complex filters and collaboration, but then not do dependencies. Imo dependencies is the big difference between something you can use on complex projects, and a “mere”…

This. To me, it seems like a weird market blind spot. Most of the tools in this space can't even do a proper tree - typically they limit you to 2-4 levels, like "project", "task", "subtask" and "checklist". The few that don't, stick to the tree model, even though work naturally structures itself into a DAG.

From the other end, I know MS Project has pretty much all the things you need, but has questionable UX, is quite buggy (I've personally managed to brick it after running auto-scheduling on a project with ~20 tasks...). There probably exist tools with the correct representation, perhaps even better UX - but I've never heard of any. Neither did a project manager I know, in a decades-old company with well established "classical engineering" culture, which includes all the PMBOK-related concept space.

And if I'm doing my semi-regular project management rant once again (a subset of more general ranting that, on Mastodon, I started to tag as #ItsAGraph, #NotATree), let me pile on some extra wishlist items: counterfactual modelling, conditionals, probabilities. That is, expressing the idea that there are alternative strategies to pursue, and which one to take depends on information available only partway through the project.

Re: Vikunja – Open-source, self-hostable to-do app

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker is crazy simple, I love it.

What I don't like about Docker is it does not respect the firewall rules that I setup using something like ufw.

Docker doesn't change iptables as set up by ufw. do you have more info on your issue?
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