cainban

cainban is a command-line kanban board that exposes its capabilities through an MCP server, enabling AI tools to interact with your tasks. It supports a full CLI experience for managing tasks, a feature-rich TUI for navigating large boards, and an embedded MCP server that lets external clients connect and issue commands or queries as if they were using the local CLI. The MCP integration is designed to work with AI assistants and clients that conform to the Model Context Protocol, making it easy to automate task creation, updates, and reads from your kanban board. The server uses a lightweight SQLite backend for persistent storage, ensuring you can manage boards and tasks without a heavy setup.

To use the MCP server, start the cainban binary with the mcp subcommand (as shown in the configuration). Once running, external MCP clients can connect to your local instance and issue requests such as listing tasks, creating new tasks, updating statuses, or querying task details. Examples from the project demonstrate how to configure popular tools like Amazon Q CLI and Claude Desktop to reference the cainban MCP server, enabling natural-language interactions and automated task management through those environments.

Prerequisites:

• Go or a pre-built binary depending on your platform
• Git (for source installation)
• Basic shell environment (bash, zsh, or PowerShell)

Option A: Download Pre-built Binary (Recommended)

• Visit the GitHub Releases page for cainban and download the appropriate binary for your platform.
• Make it executable and place it in your PATH, e.g.: bash [Download] cainban-linux-amd64 chmod +x cainban-linux-amd64 sudo mv cainban-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/cainban

Option B: Build from Source

1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/hmain/cainban.git cd cainban

2. Quick setup with install script (recommended): ./install.sh

3. Or manual build: go mod tidy go build -o cainban cmd/cainban/main.go

4. Initialize your kanban board (if needed): ./cainban init

Usage:

• Run the MCP-enabled server: ./cainban mcp
• Use the CLI to manage tasks when not using MCP; for example: ./cainban add "Task title" "Optional description"

Tips and common considerations:

• The MCP server uses the same underlying data store as the CLI/TUI, so your tasks persist between sessions.
• When configuring MCP clients (e.g., Amazon Q CLI or Claude Desktop), point them to the server binary with the mcp argument as shown in the README examples.
• If you upgrade cainban, ensure the MCP configuration paths remain valid and the binary location for the command in your MCP client configurations is updated if you relocate the binary.
• The tool supports fuzzy matching for task retrieval and updates; when IDs are ambiguous or missing, the system will attempt a fuzzy search to resolve the intended task.
• For large task lists, the TUI offers viewport-based scrolling and dynamic column widths; ensure your terminal size is sufficient to take advantage of the UI features.