Moving Away from Todoist - to Taskwarrior, SSH & Dropbox - Part 2
A syncing workflow with Taskwarrior, Dropbox and SSH + rsync.
This post continues from Part 1 - Why Todoist no longer works for me.
I write the following Taskwarrior workflow from a Linux point of view, and as someone comfortable with Vim and TUIs/terminal user interfaces. The same syncing setup should apply across all Unix-like systems. (In fact, my setup works on my Mac M1 machines with zero config changes.)
For syncing, I had 3 requirements:
Tasks must sync automatically across all my local machines.
Tasks must be accessible from a server, and sync from it too.
The solution must use nothing beyond Dropbox and shell scripts.
I installed Taskwarrior and its additional TUI on both my local and the server/remote machine.
sudo apt-get install taskwarrior
(The interesting part: locally I'm using TW 2.62. Whereas due to libc differences, I'm using an older version on my server: 2.53. But the task files are compatible, only that additional newer features are not accessible on the server, which I don't need most of the time.)
Create and fill-up the local ~/.taskrc file:
data.location=~/Dropbox/tasks
Create a similar remote ~/.taskrc file:
data.location=~/tasks
Generate your local keys, and upload them to the server for passwordless logins with rsync:
cat id_rsa.pub | ssh USER@SERVER 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'
For the syncing mechanism, I wrote a simple two-way/rsync-based mechanism - taskwarrior-sync-server.sh:
echo "Syncing local machine with server..."
rsync -auv ~/Dropbox/tasks USER@SERVER:~;
echo "Syncing server with local machine..."
rsync -auv root@SERVER:/USER/tasks ~/Dropbox;
With the above done, I then create taskwarrior_tui.sh. It encapsulates the syncing mechanism before/after calling Taskwarrior-TUI (and thus I no longer start the TUI directly):
OS=$(uname -s)
sh ~/_shell_scripts/taskwarrior-sync-server.sh
if [ "$OS" = 'Darwin' ]; then
~/apps-mac/taskwarrior-tui;
else
taskwarrior-tui;
fi
sh ~/_shell_scripts/taskwarrior-sync-server.sh
Lastly, set up and copy Bash aliases between local/remote. I've only a few for Taskwarrior:
alias t="task"
alias ta="task add"
alias tan="task add +next"
alias tard="task add +readings"
alias ty="~/taskwarrior-sync-server.sh"
alias tw="~/taskwarrior_tui.sh"
I think the above solution is simple and elegant! I believe so for these reasons:
I'm glancing through tasks with Taskwarrior-TUI most of the time. Tasks sync between my remote/local machine whenever I load up/close the TUI, so I never need to manually sync anything, just like with Todoist.
Yet when working from the standard Taskwarrior command-line interface (especially when batch-adding tasks) or when I want to, I can always sync tasks manually by calling taskwarrior-sync-server.sh directly.
Syncing respects modification times. I've not encountered file conflicts.
I can work on my tasks locally, or on the server when I only have my iPhone/iPad (e.g. with Termius/Blink). I can be anywhere with any of my machines, so long as I have SSH access.
My tasks are always saved in a Dropbox folder. I need only sync to/from the server with one machine at a time; it is Dropbox that propagates the changes across all other machines. So I can now start, continue or end work from any machine, without need for another syncing script.
Dropbox has automated version control. Its versioning history serves as backup, and with it, I can restore earlier copies without needing Git.
Todoist's poor search means that tasks essentially disappear after I mark them complete. With Taskwarrior, I get proper archival, and even have access to the power of tools like ripgrep.
I particularly love this workflow. I've essentially emulated a task-syncing process across all my machines simpler than Taskserver, and without having to install further dependencies than what I already use. And it opens up whole other avenues of task execution (since I can pipe tasks to Python scripts and cronjobs). This workflow has never caused problems and I hope the experience continues.