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Install Taskwarrior on Ubuntu 16.10

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Task Warrior Title Graphic

Taskwarrior is an open source tool that manages tasks from the command line. Taskwarrior is blazing fast, written in C, updated frequently and available on practically every platform. This guide shows you how to install Taskwarrior on a Linode running Ubuntu 16.10.

Before You Begin

  1. Familiarize yourself with our Getting Started guide and complete the steps for setting your Linode’s timezone.

  2. This guide will use sudo wherever possible. Complete the sections of our Securing Your Server guide to create a standard user account, harden SSH access and remove unnecessary network services. Taskwarrior does not require opening ports in your firewall unless you choose to run it as a server daemon for multiple devices to connect to.

  3. Update your system:

    sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Install Taskwarrior

Install Taskwarrior with the command:

sudo apt install task

After the packages are installed, run the command, task.

The system will ask if you want to create a configuration file for your user.

Answer yes.

You’ll find the sample configuration file at ~/.taskrc. To learn more about configuring task.rc, see the official documentation.

Manage Tasks with Taskwarrior

You can manage your tasks and effectively use Taskwarrior with a handful of simple commands. Taskwarrior recommends spending time prioritizing your analog task list before applying the following commands to automate it.

Add a Task

To add a task, run the command, task add.

For example:

task add Add block storage volume to my Linode

will return:

Created task 1.

If you then run task again, you’ll see the job information. Taskwarrior assigns the newly added task an ID, and tracks the time elapsed since you ran the command.

taskwarrior@localhost:~$ task
[task next]

ID Age Description                             Urg
 1 14s Add block storage volume to my Linode    0

1 task

You can add as many tasks as you want.

task add Attend Linux Users Group
Created task 2.

task add buy groceries
Created task 3.

Complete a Task

After you complete a task, you can mark it “done” using the [done] command (https://taskwarrior.org/docs/commands/done.html). The syntax is task <task_number> done.

taskwarrior@localhost:~$ task 1 done
Completed task 1 'Add block storage volume to my Linode'.
Completed 1 task.

Remove a Task

To remove a task you can run the task <task_number> delete command.

taskwarrior@localhost:~$ task 2 delete
Permanently delete task 2 'Attend Linux Users group'? (yes/no) yes
Deleting task 2 'Attend Linux Users group'.
Deleted 1 task.

Assign Tasks a Due Date

Using the due argument, you can assign a due date for a task:

task add write Taskwarrior guide for the Linode community due:tomorrow

taskwarrior@localhost:~$ task
[task next]

ID Age   Due Description                                      Urg
  2 11s    7h write Taskwarrior guide for the Linode community 8.65
  1 16min     buy groceries                                       0

2 tasks

The due argument allows a significant breadth for input. Read more about what’s possible with the due argument at the official documentation.

Taskwarrior supports recurring tasks by using the recur argument. The example below creates a daily task, the first of which is due 23 hours from the time of creation:

task add update ubuntu recur:daily due:daily

taskwarrior@localhost:~$ task
[task next]

ID Age   Recur Due Description                                      Urg
 2 11min        7h write Taskwarrior guide for the Linode community 8.65
 4         P1D 23h update ubuntu                                    8.34
 1 28min           buy groceries                                       0

3 tasks
Creating recurring task instance 'update ubuntu'

Visualization

Taskwarrior does much more than just list the tasks you’ve added on the command line. The burndown feature outputs graphical representations of your Taskwarrior workflow.

Task Warrior Burndown

The calendar feature shows a calendar that contains all your tasks and due dates. Task calendar

Next Steps with Taskwarrior

The next step to incorporate a Taskwarrior workflow into your life is to install task server on your Linode. Because Taskwarrior can be used across all your devices, including your phone, a central server in which to sync the data is needed. Taskwarrior offers do-it-yourself documentation on setting up such a task server: Installing Taskserver.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

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This guide is published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license.