Kanboard's built-in recurrence is event-triggered (a card recurs when you move or close it). RecoReco adds calendar-triggered recurrence: a card fires on a date, on its own, via cron -- made for bills, rent, and subscriptions.

A card marked recurring stays as a template; on schedule, RecoReco spawns a plain (non-recurring) copy into a column you choose. The template advances to the next date; the copy keeps the fired date.

A note on card order. Because the template keeps its identity (and its id) for the life of the plan while its due date advances, the template ends up as the oldest id carrying the latest date. The spawned copies, by contrast, are ordered naturally (older copy = older id = older date). This is intentional: a stable, editable template that stays in place is worth more than making the one generator card sort by date. Native Kanboard recurrence avoids the mismatch only by reincarnating the card every cycle, which RecoReco deliberately does not do.

RecoReco is opt-in per card and inert until you mark a card, so it needs no per-board setting. It leaves native recurrence untouched (the two are mutually exclusive per card).

The idea

The due date is the anchor. All timing (day, month, weekday, time) is read from the card's due date -- there are no separate date inputs. A card without a due date cannot be made recurring.
Frequencies: yearly, monthly by day, monthly by weekday, weekly, daily.
Last day of the month: an explicit checkbox (honored only when the due date is the last day, or the last such weekday, of its month).
Lead time: "create the copy N days before the due date", so the card shows up early enough to act on; the copy is still due on the real day.

Scheduling (cron)

The engine runs from the CLI command recoreco:run. Add it to cron four times a day -- at 05:58, 11:58, 17:58 and 23:58:

58 5,11,17,23 * * * cd /path/to/kanboard && php cli recoreco:run >> /var/log/recoreco.log 2>&1

(Point the path at your install and run it as the user that owns Kanboard's data.) Each run looks ahead 12 hours; the runs overlap by 6 hours, so a single missed run is covered by the next one.

Each run walks a template forward from its current due date and spawns every occurrence whose fire time has arrived -- so occurrences already in the past are backfilled, not skipped. To avoid flooding the board when a template was set far in the past, a single run spawns at most the 12 most recent due occurrences; any older overflow is skipped (contiguous, no gap) and the template advances straight to the next future occurrence. days before shifts a copy earlier within the lead. Runs are idempotent: an occurrence is never spawned twice, so running an extra time is safe.

You can trigger the exact same pass by hand -- either on the CLI (php cli recoreco:run) or with the Run now button under Settings -> RecoReco (admin only). The button and cron do the identical thing.

Stopping a finite plan

By default a recurring card recurs forever. To make it stop, give it a limit in the Recurring schedule dialog:

Stop after N recurrences -- a plain count; blank or 0 means recur forever. RecoReco keeps a 1-based progress counter and turns the recurrence off once it passes the limit.
Follow FinanceBuddy installments -- shown only on boards where FinanceBuddy is enabled (and on by default there). RecoReco reads the card's installment total and current live from FinanceBuddy (never copied) and stops after the last installment. Because the numbers are read fresh, editing them in FinanceBuddy just works: start mid-plan (enter 222/420), re-purchase (reset the current installment), or extend (raise the total) -- no RecoReco bookkeeping to keep in sync.

When a followed plan ends, the parked template is left one past the last installment (p4/3 for a three-installment plan) as a visible "spent" marker, its recurrence off, with an activity-stream entry recording the completion.

Trigger column and move-mode

Two options in the Recurring schedule dialog change where and how a card recurs:

Trigger column. By default (Any) a card fires wherever it sits. Set a Trigger column and it only fires while parked there -- so a template spawns only from its "active" column, and moving it elsewhere quietly pauses it. The any but selected checkbox inverts the choice (fire in every column except the selected one, e.g. "any but Archive"). The target column never triggers, in any mode -- this is what lets a moved card come to rest in the target without re-firing. (One edge to know: a duplicate template dragged into its own target column no longer spawns; previously it fired from any column. Templates normally sit elsewhere, so this rarely bites.)
Move instead of copy. Tick "Move the card instead of creating a copy" and RecoReco relocates the one card to the target column each period instead of spawning a clone -- made for a recurring chore you don't want piling up copies. Pair it with a trigger column: e.g. trigger = Done, target = Todo -- cron moves the card Done -> Todo when it's due; you do the task and drag it back to Done; repeat. Move-mode honors the recurrence limit (stop after N moves) but not the FinanceBuddy follow (there is no copy to advance an installment on). Moves are silent (no "moved to column" notification each period).

Status

All five frequencies work (yearly, monthly by day, monthly by weekday, weekly, daily) with the last-day rule, board recurrence icons, backfill with the 12-occurrence cap, the Run-now button, a recurrence limit (standalone or following FinanceBuddy installments), the FinanceBuddy installment hand-off, a per-card trigger column, and move-mode (relocate instead of copy).

Requirements

Kanboard >= 1.2.0
cron (to run recoreco:run)

Installation

Copy this folder into your Kanboard installation as plugins/RecoReco/. The directory name must be exactly RecoReco (Kanboard derives the plugin namespace from the folder name). No build step and no database migration. Then add the cron entry above.

License

AGPL-3.0. See LICENSE.

More Kanboard plugins by Dr. Beco

All free and AGPL-3.0, at code.beco.cc:

FinanceBuddy -- attach a money value (debit/credit and installments) to cards, shown on the card and totalled per column.
QualKard -- flashcard spaced repetition: grade a card by dragging it to a column, and it comes back when due (needs RecoReco).
WorkspaceOrg -- group your projects into personal per-user workspaces, shown on a "My workspaces" dashboard page with a badge on each project.
OrganonTweaks -- an umbrella of small quality-of-life board tweaks: remove an empty column, always show the comment icon, emphasize due dates, extra search keywords and shared board filters, and more.
BulkMoveTasks -- move every task from one board column to another in a single action.
ShrinkVertically -- shrink vertically-collapsed board columns so the horizontal scrollbar stays within reach.
TweakDrag -- board drag and touch niceties: drag-to-scroll, a wider column gap, and smoother card dragging.