Not every thought or task needs to be tracked on the shared team board. Kanbus allows you to create "Local Tasks" which are stored in a project-local/ directory that is automatically ignored by Git. These are visible only to you on your machine.

Initialization & Creation

You can initialize the local directory explicitly, but Kanbus will also create it automatically the first time you create a local task.

Terminal

# Optional: Explicitly initialize the local directory and .gitignore
kanbus init --local

# Create a local issue (automatically handles setup if needed)
kanbus create --local "Spike: try the new auth library"

Listing Local Issues

By default, running kanbus list shows both shared and local issues seamlessly. You can isolate the output using flags:

Terminal

# Show both shared and local issues
kanbus list

# Show ONLY shared issues
kanbus list --no-local

# Show ONLY local issues
kanbus list --local-only

Promoting and Localizing

If a local experiment turns into actual team work, you can "promote" it. If a team task becomes something you just want to track personally, you can "localize" it.

Terminal

# Move a local issue to the shared team board (project-local/ -> project/)
kanbus promote kanbus-a1b2c3

# Move a shared team issue to your local board (project/ -> project-local/)
kanbus localize kanbus-a1b2c3

Note: Local tasks function perfectly whether you use native Kanbus storage or Beads compatibility mode.