Dew

Dew is a git-native project management CLI for developers who want a kanban board that lives in their repository and talks to AI agents. Tickets are plain Markdown files with YAML frontmatter — diff-friendly, grep-able, and version-controlled alongside your code.

Features

Kanban CLI

16 subcommands cover the full lifecycle of a ticket:

create  list    get      update   delete  move
search  comment archive  unarchive link   unlink
stats   board   config   tui

Tickets are stored as .project/kanban/<column>/<ID>.md files. Labels, milestones, typed bidirectional links, and inline comments are all first-class citizens. See the Kanban documentation for the full command reference.

Infrastructure

dew infra discovers services under .project/infrastructure/services, validates their manifests and schemas, and manages Podman Quadlets through systemd. The runtime boundary is explicit so other container backends can be added later.

Interactive TUI

dew kanban tui opens a full Trello-style terminal board with three modes:

• Board — navigate columns and tickets, create/edit/move/archive/delete, live search filter
• Detail — scrollable view of a ticket's body and comments
• Editor — in-terminal modal for editing all ticket fields; opens $VISUAL/$EDITOR for the body

The TUI auto-refreshes when ticket files change on disk, so it stays in sync whether you're editing files directly or an AI agent is updating them.

MCP Server

dew mcp serve starts an MCP-compliant stdio server that exposes every kanban command as an MCP tool. AI agents (GitHub Copilot, Claude, etc.) can create tickets, move cards, search, and comment — using the exact same logic as the CLI. No separate tool definitions needed: every command that mixes in DewToolCommand is registered automatically. See the MCP documentation.

Installation

dart pub global activate dew

Requires Dart SDK ^3.12.0.

Quick start

# Scaffold a new project (creates .project/dew.yaml)
dew init .

# Create your first ticket
dew kanban create --title "My first ticket" --type task

# Open the interactive board
dew kanban tui

Configuration

Dew reads .project/dew.yaml for board columns, ticket types, ID prefix, and MCP server settings. Running dew init . generates this file with defaults. See the Configuration documentation for the full schema reference.

Documentation

• Full documentation index
• Infrastructure — service manifests, Quadlet install, lifecycle commands
• Kanban board — CLI commands, TUI keybindings, ticket format
• MCP server — AI agent integration
• Configuration reference