Basalt

A project & task tracker template for Obsidian Bases — kanban board, live project progress, and a single dashboard, all in plain Markdown.

Like its namesake, it's what you get when the molten backlog cools into something solid.

What you get

• Dashboard.md — one bookmarked home note: in-flight kanban, active projects, up next, done, bugs, recently edited. Opens in reading view automatically.
• Tasks.base — a drag-and-drop kanban board plus table views (All, Up Next, Bugs, Done, Recently edited), driven entirely by note frontmatter.
• Projects.base — projects with live Done / Open / Progress % computed from task backlinks; no counts are ever stored or updated by hand.
• Templates for new project and task notes.

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.9+ (Bases core plugin).
• Community plugins are bundled in .obsidian/plugins/ and pre-enabled — on first launch, Obsidian will ask you to trust the vault and enable community plugins. Say yes and everything works out of the box.

Easiest way to use this

With the GitHub CLI installed:

gh repo create my-vault --template alkime/basalt --private --clone
open my-vault

Then in Obsidian: Open folder as vault → pick the folder, and enable community plugins when prompted. That first open registers the vault; from then on you can jump straight to it from a terminal with:

open "obsidian://vault/my-vault"

No gh? See below.

Getting started

1. Click Use this template on GitHub — or, with no git at all, Code → Download ZIP and unzip it.
2. In Obsidian: Open folder as vault → pick the cloned folder.
3. When prompted, enable community plugins.
4. Open Dashboard.md (it's bookmarked) and start replacing the sample projects and tasks with your own.

How it works

• One note per task in Tasks/, one per project in Projects/. A task belongs to a project via its project frontmatter property (a wikilink like [[Website Redesign]]) — not folder placement.
• Task statuses: Backlog, Up Next, In progress, Done, Cancelled. The kanban columns and dashboard views key off these exact strings.
• Project statuses: Not started, In progress, Ongoing, Done.
• Tag a task #bug (or tags: [bug]) and it appears in the dashboard's Bugs section.
• Each project note embeds Tasks.base#Project Tasks, which filters to tasks whose project link resolves to that note. Hitting + New in that embedded view creates the task with its project property already pointing at the project you're in.
• Drag cards between kanban columns to change a task's status; use the board's + to quick-add a task into a column.

[!note] Project progress is computed from file.backlinks. If you create or edit many notes outside Obsidian (scripts, git pulls) and the numbers look stale, fully quit and relaunch Obsidian to force a re-index.

Customizing

• Statuses: rename them in task frontmatter and in the Tasks.base view filters/columnOrders — the strings must match exactly.
• New views: add them in the Bases UI or by editing the .base YAML; embed any view in a note with ![[Tasks.base#View Name]].
• Vault color: the bundled peacock.css snippet extends your accent color (Settings → Appearance → Accent color) onto the window chrome — Peacock-style — so each vault built from this template is recognizable at a glance. Pick a different accent per vault; delete the snippet if you'd rather keep stock chrome.
• Banners & icons: the Pixel Banner and Iconic plugins are included. Give any note a cover image with banner: "![[Attachments/your-image.jpg]]" frontmatter or the banner-flag icon on the note (adjust the crop with banner-y: 0–100), and set per-file icons via Iconic. Add obsidianUIMode: preview to make a note always open in reading view.
• Dates: type @ for natural-language dates (@tomorrow → 2026-09-09).

Bundled community plugins

Plugin	Purpose
Kanban Bases View	Drag-and-drop kanban view for Bases
Columns	Side-by-side layout on the dashboard
Force note view mode	obsidianUIMode frontmatter → dashboard opens in reading view
Pixel Banner	Cover images via banner frontmatter or its banner-flag GUI
Iconic	Per-file/tab/folder icons
Natural Language Dates	@-triggered date entry
Single Choice Property	Keeps list properties to one value
Bases Toolbox	Find & replace property values, property index

Bundled plugin builds remain under their respective authors' licenses.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Template only; bundled plugins belong to their authors.