Nullboard on a Raspberry Pi

A few months ago, I stumbled upon Nullboard, a minimalist Kanban board. I’ve always had a soft spot for time and task-management softwares, as well for minimalism. I was immediately intrigued by its simplicity and its intelligence: the data is stored in the browser, so the entire software is just a simple HTML page.

The other day, I decided to self-host it on my brand new Raspberry Pi 5. I wanted some simple rules:

To access it on a port other than 80/443, from my LAN only — I chose 8880
To create backups using its own tool, but unfortunately this is only available for Windows

Regarding the second point, I quickly found a Linux alternative. Then, I decided to self-host both the Nullboard HTML page and the backup agent. After cloning both repositories on the Raspberry, I ended up with this directory structure:

/opt/
├── nullboard-nodejs-agent/
│   └── backups             # Where the backups will be stored
└── nullboard/
    └── index.html          # The actual Nullboard webpage

it’s that simple. The only remaining task was to make the Nullboard page available via a URL such as http://<raspberry-ip>:8880. Since I use Caddy, I added the following lines to the Caddyfile configuration:

:8880 {
    root * /opt/nullboard
    file_server

    route /agent* {
        header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *
        header Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET, POST, PUT, OPTIONS"
        header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Content-Type, X-Access-Token"

        # Respond to preflight OPTIONS requests
        @options {
            method OPTIONS
        }
        respond @options 204

        uri strip_prefix /agent
        reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:10001
    }
}

Also, the TCP ports 8880 and 10001 (the one used by the backup agent) must be opened on the Pi’s firewall.

Et voilà! A minimalist setup for a minimalist Kanban board.

The Alternative

On the same list of self-hostable software where I read about Nullboard, I also came across Planka. I couldn’t resist installing it because, just like Nullboard, it seemed quite simple and lightweight with almost zero configuration needed. However, it feels very different and has many more options… perhaps even too many! I’ll try them for a couple of weeks, then I’ll uninstall one… We’ll see!

🎮 …still nothing

🎧 Some metal suggested by Bandcamp

📖 Still the horror anthology

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