PlanPad

PlanPad is a self-hosted personal planning and self-development platform. It brings routines, habits, life goals, a week-based timeline, cost management, a backlog kanban, ideas, nested markdown pages, a calendar overview and a life dashboard together in one app that runs from a single Docker container.

It is a single-user app with optional Google Authenticator (TOTP) two-factor login. Your data lives in one SQLite file on your own machine.

Features

• Dashboard with a live age counter (years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds) and a 100-circle lifespan grid, plus activity stats.
• Routines as reusable schemas with per-day time slots (start/end time per day of week). Assign one action to several days at once, clone an item into another table, or duplicate a whole table. The done/not state is tracked per week, not on the schema. A Google-Calendar-style week view lets you drag events to move or resize them, including across days.
• Habits: tables of daily-checked habits that each track a start-to-end date range, unfolding into weekly grids, with dashboard analytics (completion rate, streaks, trend across tables).
• Goals: life goals with a start date, an estimation (days / weeks / months / years) and a progress percentage. A time-based roadmap draws every goal as a dot on its target date; reaching 100% moves it to the Achievements list.
• Costs: cost categories and groups in EUR/USD, monthly planning mapped onto the timeline, predicted vs actual tracking down to individual purchases, and charts on the calendar and dashboard. Currencies are never converted or mixed.
• Timeline of weeks grouped year to month to week. Generate weeks for any date range and see routine completion per week, month and year.
• Week detail with routine assignment, a checklist grouped by day of week, a completion report and per-day markdown notes.
• Backlog kanban (To Do / Done) with drag and drop. A card's date automatically links it to the matching week.
• Ideas list with title, description, why it is a good idea, a proposed date and a created date.
• Reminders with a severity level (critical / medium / low) and open / done sections. The sidebar shows a pulsing severity dot (red / orange / green) for the highest open level, and a post-login alert warns when critical reminders are open.
• Burnout log: a 0–10 level bar, a colour (red / orange / green), a description, a reason, and selectable factor tiles, each with its own icon.
• Fun log: a 0–10 level bar and a description for the moments you enjoyed.
• Health section for tracking health notes alongside the rest of your life.
• Pages: nested markdown pages and sub-pages with a live editor. Folders collapse/expand, selecting a folder shows an overview (item / sub-folder / page counts) in the main panel, pages can be dragged to re-parent them, and you can import from a Trilium .zip export (preserving the original hierarchy and order).
• Sticky note: a floating, dockable, resizable note window that follows you across pages and is editable in place.
• Calendar: an activity heatmap for the year with a daily-progress chart and a monthly predicted-vs-actual cost chart. Click any day to drill into that day's routine items below the calendar.
• Search and order-by on the backlog, routines and ideas (searching title and content), plus search on pages.
• Settings: change password, profile (username, picture, date of birth), export / import the database, a purge danger zone, and 2FA setup.
• Candlelit Planner theme (warm amber-on-ink) with a dark / light toggle in the top bar, persisted across sessions.
• Security section: a login-activity log (IP, time, browser/OS, device, region), failed-attempt visibility, and IP management — manually add or remove IPs from the blacklist. After 3 failed login attempts an IP is auto-blocked for 15 minutes.
• Configurable session timeout (10 minutes – 2 hours) in Settings.
• Customisable sidebar: file pages into your own collapsible categories; the layout is stored server-side so it follows your account across browsers.

Documentation

The docs/ folder explains every part of the app — what each feature is for, how it works and how to use it. Start with Getting started, or Architecture if you want to work on the code.

Screenshots

Login	Dashboard
Routines	Timeline
Week detail	Backlog
Ideas	Pages
Calendar	Settings

A light theme is available via the toggle in the top bar — see screenshots/light/.

Tech stack

• Frontend: Angular 20 (standalone components, signals) + Angular Material.
• Backend: Node.js + Express + TypeScript.
• Database: SQLite (via better-sqlite3).
• Auth: JWT sessions, bcrypt password hashing, TOTP 2FA (otplib).
• Packaging: a single Docker image where the API also serves the built Angular app.
• Tests: end-to-end tests with Testcontainers + Vitest.

Project layout

planpad/
  apps/
    api/        Express + SQLite backend (TypeScript)
    web/        Angular 20 + Material frontend
  libs/
    shared/     Shared TypeScript types/contract used by api and web
  e2e/          Testcontainers end-to-end tests
  Dockerfile
  docker-compose.yml
  .env / .env.template

Quick start (Docker)

cp .env.template .env       # then edit JWT_SECRET etc.
docker compose up -d --build

Open http://localhost:3000 and sign in with the default credentials admin / admin. Change the password in Settings right away.

The SQLite database is stored in the planpad-data Docker volume so it survives restarts.

Local development

Requires Node.js 22.

npm run install:all          # install api, web and e2e dependencies
npm run dev                  # API on :3000, Angular dev server on :4200 (proxies /api)

Then open http://localhost:4200.

Other scripts:

npm run build                # build api bundle + Angular app
npm run typecheck            # type-check the API
npm run test:e2e             # run the Testcontainers end-to-end suite (needs Docker)

Configuration

Copy .env.template to .env. Available variables:

Variable	Default	Description
PORT	3000	Port the server listens on.
DATABASE_PATH	./data/planpad.sqlite	SQLite file location.
JWT_SECRET	(change me)	Secret used to sign session tokens.
JWT_EXPIRES_IN	7d	Session lifetime.
DEFAULT_USERNAME	admin	Bootstrap username (first run only).
DEFAULT_PASSWORD	admin	Bootstrap password (first run only).
TOTP_ISSUER	PlanPad	Label shown in Google Authenticator.
DATE_OF_BIRTH	1990-01-01	Seeds the dashboard age counter (first run).

Security notes: set JWT_SECRET to a long random string before exposing the app anywhere, change the default password on first login, and treat database exports as sensitive — the export file contains your password hash and TOTP secret.

Tests

End-to-end tests build the Docker image, start the container and exercise the full API (login, routines, weeks, checks, backlog, ideas, pages, notes, dashboard, calendar, export/import/purge):

npm run test:e2e

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. The architecture doc explains the codebase layout and how a feature is typically added; please keep changes small and focused.

License

MIT