♛ Royal Tasks

A modern, pleasant and responsive Kanban tool that runs on normal web hosting. Royal Tasks gives a team the ease of tools like Trello, Asana, Jira or Microsoft Planner on a server of its own: drag-and-drop boards with checklists, labels, people and comments, changes that reach every member within seconds, and a design that feels as good on a phone as on a desktop. Every board is encrypted in the database, and any board can also be encrypted end to end, so that not even the server can read it.

Royal Tasks is designed for individuals, groups, or small organizations.

Why Royal Tasks

• Pleasant to use. Cards and lists behave like things you pick up and put down; every change shows at once, without waiting for the server; it works by touch and installs on a phone like an app.
• Runs on ordinary web hosting. PHP and a MySQL or MariaDB database are all it needs: no Node server, no Docker, no build step on the server, no background workers. Upload one folder, open the installer, done.
• Your data stays yours. No third-party scripts or CDNs, no tracking, encryption at rest by default, and optional end-to-end encryption per board with a recovery key.
• Open. Apache-2.0, with every bundled library credited.

Features

Boards that stay out of your way

• Lists and cards with drag and drop, on desktop and by touch. Long lists scroll while you drag, and every move shows at once, without waiting for the server.
• Cards with rich descriptions, finish dates coloured by urgency, checklists with progress, comments, attachments and title images. A card titled with a web address links to it and picks up the page's picture; a checklist item that is one shows the page's title with the site's icon.
• Up to 10 labels per board, toggled with the keys 1–9 and 0 on an open card.
• Assign cards and checklist items to people. My tasks, at the top, lists what is yours on every board: first what has no finish date, then what has one, soonest first; last, the other deadlines on your boards.
• A red bar tells you at once when the server cannot be reached, and when it is back.
• A calendar subscription (Preferences): your deadlines, or all of them, from the boards you choose, in Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar.
• Find on a board (Ctrl+F), an archive per board, Shift+Delete to delete a card, eight colour schemes, Dark and Synthwave among them.
• Built-in viewers for PDF, Word, HEIC photos, images, video, audio and text, so attachments open without leaving the card.

Made for teams

• Share a board by username as viewer or editor. Changes reach the other members within seconds, and simultaneous edits never overwrite each other.
• Profiles with a name, email address and picture.
• Invite people by email; they make their own account. "Forgot your password?" sends a link to sign in and choose a new one. Email goes out through whatever the server has: SMTP, PHP's mail() or sendmail.
• An administrator creates the accounts. There is no public sign-up.

Private by design

• Every board is encrypted in the database, and every file on disk.
• Give a board a password and it is encrypted end to end: the browser encrypts it before sending, and the server never sees the content. A recovery key covers a lost password.
• The administrator has no access to boards they are not a member of.
• A strict Content Security Policy, and no third-party scripts: every library is served from your own server.

Works where you are

• Responsive from phone to desktop, and installable as an app on Android, iPhone, iPad and computers, straight from the browser with no app store (how).
• Share a link, text or photo from your phone straight into a card, on the board and list you choose.
• Move boards in and out: import and export in Trello's JSON format, with labels, checklists and comments.
• Automatic backups to S3-compatible storage, with one backup a month kept for good.

Quick start

You need PHP 8.4+ and a MySQL or MariaDB database. Shared hosting is fine.

1. Download royal-tasks-<version>.zip from the latest release and unzip it into the folder the app should be served from, e.g. public_html/kanban/ (or copy these files from a clone).
2. Open https://yoursite/kanban/install.php and enter the database details. The installer creates the tables, the master account and config.php.
3. Sign in with the password it shows once, choose your own, and delete install.php.
4. Open Preferences → Administration once and save, so emailed links point to your site; then create accounts or invite people by email.

To update later, copy in the new files and run php upgrade.php (or open it as an administrator); see Updating.

Back up config.php with the database: it holds the key that the stored boards are encrypted with.

To try it locally:

php -S 127.0.0.1:8080 -t . router.php

then open http://127.0.0.1:8080/install.php.

Documentation

Installing and running	Requirements, install, updates, email, installing it as an app on phones and computers, S3 backups, nginx and Apache
Security and privacy	Who can see what, encryption at rest and end to end, and how the app is protected
Reporting a vulnerability	How to report a security problem privately
Developing	Layout of the code, database, styling, and the test suites
Agents.md	The design reference: every feature, and the rules the code keeps
Credits	The open-source libraries Royal Tasks is built on

Built with

PHP 8.4 and MySQL/MariaDB on the server; plain ES6 classes in the browser, with no framework and no build step beyond Tailwind CSS. Encryption uses libsodium; attachments are shown with PDF.js, mammoth and libheif. See CREDITS.md for every library and its licence.

Credits and license

Developed by Jesper Juul.

© 2026 Jesper Juul. Royal Tasks is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The libraries it ships keep their own licences; see CREDITS.md.