Whilst working on a side project, which idea came whilst working on a previous side project, I had an idea again, and this became the sideproject I will be telling you about today.
I did briefly speak about it in here but now I actually finished it as a little MVP.
Today I present you Kiffarino, a local first, file based Project Management Tool.
(Bun/Svelte5/Typescript/Hono)
Think about it like your local Trello.
Why did I do it?
Most of my sideprojects end up with a big readme.md file with a bunch of TODOs that I end up forgetting what they meant.
Few years back I created kiffari/kato, a self-hosted notion/trello alternative, but even though I use it quite a lot, I would like to have my tickets close to the code, so I can keep them close and never forget what they are for.
And that was the idea that made me switch side project.
What if I could run Kiffari, but locally, I could create a little cli utility that uses a set of folders and files to generate a kanban board where I could keep track of my tasks, tickets, docs and all.
And here it is a little demo of the MVP:
What does it do?
Quoting the readme:
Kiffarino is a lightweight, local-first project management tool built for developers and small teams who prefer a simple, CLI and Web based workflow tracking tool.
It lets you manage tasks, tickets, and projects directly within your project folder — no complex setups, cloud services, or external tools required.
Just fast, minimal, local productivity.
It's like Jira, but simple and it just works.
Features
- 🗃️ Local-first ticket and task management — Everything is stored locally in plain files, no cloud required.
- ⚡ Lightweight — Minimal dependencies, with a total size of ~420 KB.
- 🏷️ Flexible ticketing — Supports tags, filters, and status tracking out of the box.
- 🛠️ Modern stack — Built with TypeScript, Bun, and Svelte 5. 📝 Markdown-based tickets — Tickets are just Markdown files you can open and edit manually anytime.
You just install it via npm i -g kiffarino and the command kfr will be ready for you to use.
go to a folder where the sideproject is and.
kfr init # to init the config file (you can edit the folder and project name)
kfr generate # to generate the folder structure a a couple of example tickets
Then
kfr start
to serve the web ui.
And then you will have your locally running trello/jira without paying and only weighing ~400kb.
Where do we go from here?
I might start using it in the project I was working on, but I have a few more ideas to implement first, and all of them are in the README.md.
Should I use kfr to manage kiffarino as a project too? Probably.
But before using it I want to at least do the following:
- Implement the Docs management (just a set of ui utils to manage markdown files stored in a docs/ folder)
- Use the priority flag in the UI to order tickets.
- Implementing Drag&Drop to move tickets across states in the board
- Move away from zod (it is nice but it takes loads of those 400Kb even minified for just a few schema checks)
- Add Epics/Milestones to categorise tickets under a certain target.
- Tags Autocomplete/Search by Tags.
- A way to restore archived tickets.
- Github binary release so people who do not use
npmnornodecould download it as a standalone binary.
Let me know what you think, or open a PR!
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