Minitask

Minitask is rather simple project management application for the web. It is not much more than a multi-user to-do list. It does not try to be beautiful, it tries to be simple both on terms of underlying technology and user experience.

If you need 0.5% of Jira's functionality, Minitask is a great alternative.

Minitask is currently only available for self-hosting, which means you have to deploy it to your own infrastructure or to the cloud. If you are interested in paying for a hosted version, get in touch.

The user interface is not only available in English but also Hungarian. Other languages can easily be added. If you are interested in translating Minitask into your language, let me know!

Project status

As of August 2020 the project is under active development and is not yet considered to be stable.

Screenshots

Demo

• https://minitask.herokuapp.com/
• Username: demo
• Password: Demodemo1

Development

Minitask is a Django application. If you want to make changes or fix bugs, follow the instructions below.

Requirements:

• Python 3.8
• Poetry

First time setup:

poetry install
poetry run python manage.py migrate

Running the development server:

poetry run python manage.py runserver
# To enable SQL logging:
DEBUG_SQL=true poetry run python manage.py runserver

Specifying the server language:

LANGUAGE_CODE=hu-hu poetry run python manage.py runserver

Running migrations:

poetry run python manage.py migrate

Working with translations:

poetry run django-admin makemessages --locale=hu
# Edit tasks/locale/hu/LC_MESSAGES/django.po
poetry run django-admin compilemessages

Deployment

Django has excellent documentation on deploying applications to production. Below are a few concrete examples.

Configuration

Minitask can be configured using the following environment variables:

• SECRET_KEY: required, a random string. Django documentation
• DEBUG: optional, defaults to false.
• ENABLE_HEROKU_LOGGING: optional, defaults to false. Set this to true when deploying to Heroku.
• DEBUG_SQL: optional, defaults to false. Set this to true in development to have all SQL queries logged.
• ALLOWED_HOSTS: required in production. Django documentation.
• DATABASE_URL: optional, sets up the database connection. Falls back to using SQLiteif not provided. URL Schema documentation.
• LANGUAGE_CODE: optional, defaults to en-us. Sets the user interface language. Django documentation
• TIME_ZONE: optional, defaults to UTC. Set this to your local time zone, eg. Europe/Budapest. Django documentation
• SERVE_STATIC: optional, defaults to false in production. Set this to true in production unless you want to take care of serving static files outside of the Django application.
• REQUIRE_DUE_DATE: optional, defaults to false. When set to true makes the due date field of tasks mandatory.
• REQUIRE_ASSIGNEE: optional, defaults to false. When set to true makes the assignee field of tasks mandatory. Enabling this setting also makes the current user the default assignee.

What database should I use?

Minitask supports all databases that Django supports.

If you don't configure a database, Minitask will use a local SQLite database. SQLite works perfectly for development and might also be acceptable in production, if you run the application on a single server instance and the amount of concurrent write operations is very low. More about this here. The most important warning to keep in mind is that if you happen to outgrow SQLite, migrating to another database engine might be a non-trivial process, as some people on the internet claim.

Running on Ubuntu LTS

⚠️ This section is heavily work-in-progress.

Don't forget to generate a long secret, eg. with pwgen -sy 50 or your favorite password manager and set it with SECRET_KEY=v3rys3cret as seen below.

# Extract project to /opt/minitask
cd /opt/minitask
apt install python3 python3-pip
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
# Re-run this every time you install a new Minitask version
SECRET_KEY=v3rys3cret SERVE_STATIC=true DEBUG=false python manage.py collectstatic
# Replace my.host.name with whatever domain name or ip address you use for accessing the application.
# You can add more configuration options hire, like LANGUAGE_CODE=hu-hu
SERVE_STATIC=true ALLOWED_HOSTS=my.host.name DEBUG=false SECRET_KEY=v3rys3cret gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 minitask.wsgi
SECRET_KEY=v3rys3cret python manage.py createsuperuser

The application should be listening at http://hostname:8000.

Deploying to Heroku

Heroku is one of the easiest cloud platform to deploy to. If you are not familiar with Heroku start here. Minitask works fine on a free Heroku account.

heroku create my-tasks
heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
heroku config:set ALLOWED_HOSTS=my-tasks.herokuapp.com
heroku config:set SERVE_STATIC=true
heroku config:set ENABLE_HEROKU_LOGGING=true
heroku config:set DEBUG=false
# Generate a long secret, eg. with `pwgen -sy 50`
heroku config:set SECRET_KEY=something_very_secret
# Optional
heroku config:set LANGUAGE_CODE=hu-hu
heroku config:set TIME_ZONE=Europe/Budapest
# Deploy
git push heroku master
# Create superuser
heroku run python manage.py createsuperuser