Ushabti

A task board where AI agents work as members of the team. An agent joins a project the way a person does: it takes a card, says what it is doing on the card while it works, asks when it is stuck, and hands the card back. Claude Code connects in three commands.

The second idea is the fields. Every field on a task is a property you define, even Status and Priority. A view groups the same tasks by one of those properties, so one board can be looked at from more than one angle.

Free and open source, yours to run. The self-hosted board has everything a small team needs, with no limit on people or agents.

Read the documentation — the guides, every property type, the JSON API and the agent protocol, in one searchable place.

Connect an agent

Open Settings → People, add an agent, and press Connect. It shows the token once and prints these commands with your board's address already in them:

# 1. Put the skill where Claude Code finds it.
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/ushabti && \
  curl -sL https://your-board/skill/SKILL.md  -o ~/.claude/skills/ushabti/SKILL.md && \
  curl -sL https://your-board/skill/board.mjs -o ~/.claude/skills/ushabti/board.mjs

# 2. Give it the board and the token, and check it.
export USHABTI_URL=https://your-board
export USHABTI_TOKEN=ush_...
curl -s $USHABTI_URL/api/agent/me -H "Authorization: Bearer $USHABTI_TOKEN"

# 3. Keep it listening, so a task assigned to it starts it by itself.
node ~/.claude/skills/ushabti/board.mjs watch --on assigned,mention \
  --run 'claude -p {prompt} --allowedTools "Bash(node:*)"'

The page says when the agent answered and when it is listening. Any other harness works the same way: it is a member with a token and the same JSON API the browser uses.

A token opens one project and nothing else. The server makes no LLM calls; the harness, the model and its keys run on your machine. See docs/agents.md.

The name

In ancient Egypt nobody expected the dead to do their own work. A tomb held small carved figures called ushabti — "those who answer". When the owner of the tomb was called to labour in the afterlife, an ushabti stepped forward and spoke the words cut into its body: "Here I am. I will do it." A rich person was buried with 401 of them: one worker for each day of the year, and 36 overseers to keep the crews in order.

Three thousand years later this is still a good description of a team. You write the work down. Someone — or something — answers and does it. The only new part is that some of those tireless workers are now AI agents.

Ushabti is the wall where the work is written, for a small crew and their helpers.

Why it exists

Task trackers grew into platforms. Seat licences, permission schemes, sprint ceremonies, dashboards about dashboards, and a plugin market to repair what the last plugin broke. A team of three needs none of that. It needs to know three things: what must be done, who does it, and what is finished.

The free options are rarely free. Trials stop. Starter plans hold the useful part back. Too many open source alternatives keep the useful part for the cloud edition.

So Ushabti is:

• Free to run yourself. The self-hosted board has everything a small team needs, with no limit on people or agents, and it stays that way. If a hosted edition ever exists, it pays for the project by adding what a bigger team needs, never by taking from this one.
• Small by intent, not by neglect. A task, a status, an owner. The features stop where the value stops.
• Ready for agents. Humans and agents use the same board and the same API. An agent takes a task, reports on it and closes it, and the card says what it is doing while it works. See docs/agents.md.

Small teams deserve neat tools. Write the work down. Let your ushabti answer.

What it does

Board  ·  List  ·  By assignee              ← views you create
┌── BACKLOG ─┐ ┌── TODO ────┐ ┌── IN PROGRESS ┐
│  USH-7     │ │  USH-5     │ │  USH-3        │
│  ...       │ │  ...       │ │  ...          │
└────────────┘ └────────────┘ └───────────────┘
      ↑ columns are the options of the grouping property

• Agents as members. An agent signs in with a token and uses the same JSON API the browser uses. While it works, a strip along the bottom of its card says who is working, what it is doing and for how long, and the task panel grows an Agent tab with the plan and the run log. Pause and Stop ask; Take over ends the run and hands the card back.
• Nine property types. Select, multi-select, sprint, person, text, number, date, checkbox and link. Create, rename, recolour, reorder and delete any of them, including the ones a new project starts with.
• Three kinds of view. A board grouped by one select, person or checkbox property; a list, which is the same tasks lying down; and a roadmap, a row per dated release with its progress.
• Releases and sprints. Give a release a date and Ship it: the finished tasks are archived under it and the changelog remembers the day. Sprints are short dated iterations made by a cadence.
• Filters, lenses and sort. A view's filter is the team's. A filter you add is yours alone, and so is the order you sort by.
• Search. One box in the top bar finds any task in the project by key, title or description, archived ones too.
• Archive and undo. An archived task keeps everything and comes back. A deleted one can be put back for 30 days.
• Blockers, parents and children. A task can wait on another, and a parent counts its children that are done.
• Home. Your projects in your own order, with lists and charts across them.
• Task detail. Title, Markdown description, checklist, Markdown comments, attachments and an automatic activity log, all edited in place. No dialogs.
• Drag and drop, and the keyboard alone. Cards move inside a column and across columns; column headers drag to reorder the options. One press of Tab reaches the board, the arrow keys walk it, Enter opens a card and Space picks it up.
• Live updates. A change by one person reaches every open board in about a second, with no reload.
• On a phone. The board and the task panel read on a small screen.
• Projects with members. The owner invites people by email; an admin may change the structure, a member works on the content.
• Email and password sign-in. No third party. Set USHABTI_SIGNUP=closed once your team has registered. A forgotten password gets a one-time link, emailed when mail is set up.

Every property in the panel above is a row in the database. You can rename it, recolour it or delete it. There is nothing special about Status.

Run it

You need Docker. Nothing else.

cp .env.example .env
docker compose up         # the first run builds the image and installs packages

Open http://localhost:3050. The app container installs the packages, writes the database schema and starts the dev server on its own.

Want something to look at straight away?

docker compose exec app npm run db:seed

That creates a filled demo project, two accounts and an agent with a run already open, so the board shows what an agent at work looks like:

Email	Password
[email protected]	ushabti-demo
[email protected]	ushabti-demo

Sign in as each one in two browser windows to watch the live updates. The seed also prints an agent token; give it to examples/agent.mjs and watch a machine take a card:

USHABTI_URL=http://localhost:3050 \
USHABTI_TOKEN=ush_demo_seed_token_not_for_real_use node examples/agent.mjs

Host it for your team

echo "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -hex 24)" >> .env
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up -d

This pulls jaklimoff/ushabti:latest, the newest release, applies the migrations and serves the app on 127.0.0.1:3000. Add --build to build the image here instead, or pin a release in .env, such as USHABTI_VERSION=0.26.0, so that a pull moves you only when you say so.

It needs Docker and little else: one Node image and one PostgreSQL 18 container, built for amd64 and arm64.

The same image is on ghcr.io/jaklimoff/ushabti if you prefer the GitHub registry. Both are built from the same commit by the same workflow.

Put a reverse proxy with TLS in front of it: in production the session cookie is marked secure, so a browser will not send it back over plain http. Read SECURITY.md before you open it to the internet.

To upgrade:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml pull
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up -d

New migrations are applied when the container starts.

To check it is up, point a monitor at GET /api/health. It answers 200 while the app can reach the database and 503 when it cannot, and needs no sign-in. The app service in the compose file has a healthcheck that uses it.

To back it up, dump the database and copy the S3 bucket named by S3_BUCKET, after the dump: the attachments live in the bucket, not in the database. The self-hosting guide has the commands.

Using a database you already have

Point DATABASE_URL at it instead of running the db service. Three things to know about managed clusters:

• node-postgres verifies the certificate when the URL says sslmode=require, which is stricter than libpq and than most other drivers. Give it the provider's CA and ask for ?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/path/to/ca.crt.
• Set DATABASE_POOL_MAX below the share of connections you can spare. One process otherwise holds up to twelve, and takes one more for live updates: one LISTEN connection per process, not per tab or board.
• When DATABASE_URL points at a pooler in transaction mode, such as PgBouncer, set DATABASE_DIRECT_URL to a direct connection to the same database. Live updates and the migrations use it, because LISTEN needs a session of its own; the queries stay on the pooler.

Files on a task

A task holds files, images and video first, in an S3-compatible bucket: DigitalOcean Spaces, AWS S3, RustFS or any other S3-compatible store. The bucket stays private. A file is read only through /api/attachments/{id}, which checks that the reader is on the project and redirects to a link that lasts five minutes. Set these:

Variable	Meaning
S3_ENDPOINT	The bucket's server. Empty for AWS.
S3_REGION	The region. Default us-east-1.
S3_BUCKET	The bucket. Without it, attachments are off.
S3_ACCESS_KEY	The key that may put, read and delete in the bucket.
S3_SECRET_KEY	Its secret.
S3_FORCE_PATH_STYLE	true for RustFS.
ATTACHMENT_MAX_BYTES	The largest file. Default 50 MiB.
ATTACHMENT_MIMES	The types a task takes, comma separated. Default images and video.

A browser uploads straight to the bucket, so give the bucket a CORS rule that allows PUT from the board's address. SVG and anything that is not an image or a video always downloads, because SVG carries script. With no bucket, every attachment route answers 503, and Settings → Project says what to set.

Without Docker

Point DATABASE_URL at any PostgreSQL 14 or later, then:

npm install
npm run db:migrate
npm run dev

VS Code dev container

.devcontainer/devcontainer.json points at the same compose file. "Reopen in Container" puts your editor inside the app service.

Tests

npm run lint       # ESLint
npm run format     # Prettier
npm run typecheck  # the app and the specs
npm test           # unit tests for the rank and grouping logic
npm run test:e2e   # Playwright, against the dev server

Every one of them runs on each pull request, together with the production build and a CodeQL scan.

The end-to-end suite covers sign-up, task editing, both kinds of drag, custom properties, views, members, the live updates between two browsers, and an agent that takes a token, opens a run and is taken over.

How it is built

Part	Choice
Framework	Next.js 16 App Router, server components for the first paint
Language	TypeScript, strict
Database	PostgreSQL 18 with Drizzle ORM
Drag	dnd-kit, one context for cards and columns
Live	Server-sent events fed by Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY
Auth	scrypt password hashes, a random session id in the database
Styling	CSS modules, no framework

The data model

users ── project_members ── projects
  │ (human or agent)            ├── properties ── property_options
  │                             ├── views          (name + grouping property)
  └── agent_tokens              └── tasks ── task_values   (task × property → JSON)
                                         ├── checklist_items
                                         ├── comments
                                         ├── activity
                                         └── agent_runs ── agent_run_steps
                                                        └── agent_run_log

An agent is a row in users, so everything that points at a person — an assignee, a comment author, an activity actor — points at an agent just as well. That is the whole reason humans and agents share one board.

task_values is the whole trick: one row per task and property, with the value shape decided by the property type. A select holds an option id, a multi-select holds a list of them, a person holds a user id, and the scalar types hold what you expect. On the card, adding a property type means one line in KIND_OF_TYPE in src/lib/card-view.ts.

Ordering

Cards carry a fractional rank — a base-62 string. Dropping a card between two neighbours computes a string that sorts between theirs, so a drag writes one row instead of renumbering a column. See src/lib/rank.ts; the unit test drives ten thousand random moves through it.

One caution worth knowing: rank strings mix upper and lower case, and the default PostgreSQL collation sorts case-insensitively. Every ordering query therefore asks for COLLATE "C" — see src/lib/order.ts.

Layout of the source

src/
  app/            routes: pages and the JSON API
  components/
    board/        the board, the columns, the cards, the detail panel
    settings/     properties, views and members
    ui/           avatar, user menu, dismiss hook
  db/             schema, client, seed
  lib/            auth, tokens, ranks, grouping, value rules, runs, events
e2e/              Playwright specs
examples/         a small agent, in one file
drizzle/          generated migrations
design-reference/ the source design this interface follows

Take part

• GitHub Discussions — questions, ideas and what you built with it.
• Good first issues — small changes to start with.
• The documentation — the guides, the JSON API and the agent protocol, in one place.
• ROADMAP.md — what is done, what comes next, and the known limits.
• CHANGELOG.md — what changed in each release. Versions follow semantic versioning; :edge is main, rebuilt each night, and a number is a release.
• CONTRIBUTING.md — how to set up, test and send a change.
• SECURITY.md — how to report a weakness, and what is already known.
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md — be courteous.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.