Announcement

Focalboard Personal Server and Personal Desktop editions will transition to being fully community supported as of April 30th, 2023. This Focalboard repository will become the Personal Edition repository, and will remain open indefinitely. However, we won’t be adding any new enhancements, and will only address Sev-1 level bugs until April 30th, 2023.

The Boards plugin version will be integrated into Mattermost as a core in-product feature, and will no longer be supported as a plugin as of release v7.11 (May 2023). The plugin code will be merged into the Mattermost-server repository where future enhancements will be added to moving forward.

Please see this dicussion for more details.

Focalboard

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Focalboard is an open source, multilingual, self-hosted project management tool that's an alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana.

It helps define, organize, track and manage work across individuals and teams. Focalboard comes in three editions:

• Mattermost Boards: Integrated with the Mattermost platform for your team to plan and collaborate.

• Personal Desktop: A standalone, single-user macOS, Windows, or Linux desktop app for your own todos and personal projects.

• Personal Server: A standalone, multi-user server for development and personal use.

Try Focalboard

Mattermost Boards

Mattermost Boards combines project management tools with messaging and collaboration for teams of all sizes. To access and use Mattermost Boards, install or upgrade to Mattermost v6.0 or later as a self-hosted server. After logging into Mattermost, select the menu in the top left corner and select Boards.

Personal Desktop (Windows, Mac or Linux Desktop)

• Windows: Download from the Windows App Store or download focalboard-win.zip from the latest release, unpack, and run Focalboard.exe.
• Mac: Download from the Mac App Store.
• Linux Desktop: Download focalboard-linux.tar.gz from the latest release, unpack, and open focalboard-app.

Personal Server

Ubuntu: You can download and run the compiled Focalboard Personal Server on Ubuntu by following our latest install guide.

API Docs

Boards API docs can be found over at https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/blob/main/server/swagger/docs/html/index.html

Contribute to Focalboard

For anyone interested in being an official maintainer of the Focalboard repository, please reach out to us on our Focalboard Community Channel. If there are no maintainers, and you’re still interested in adding your own improvements to the Focalboard Personal Editions, we encourage you to fork and maintain the repository.

Getting started

Our developer guide has detailed instructions on how to set up your development environment for the Personal Server. It also provides more information about contributing to our open source community.

Clone mattermost-server into sibling directory.

Create an .env file in the focalboard directory that contains:

EXCLUDE_ENTERPRISE="1"

To build the server:

make prebuild
make

To run the server:

 ./bin/focalboard-server

Then navigate your browser to http://localhost:8000 to access your Focalboard server. The port is configured in config.json.

Once the server is running, you can rebuild just the web app via make webapp in a separate terminal window. Reload your browser to see the changes.

Building and running standalone desktop apps

You can build standalone apps that package the server to run locally against SQLite:

• Windows:
  • Requires Windows 10, Windows 10 SDK 10.0.19041.0, and .NET 4.8 developer pack
  • Open a git-bash prompt.
  • Run make prebuild
  • The above prebuild step needs to be run only when you make changes to or want to install your npm dependencies, etc.
  • Once the prebuild is completed, you can keep repeating the below steps to build the app & see the changes.
  • Run make win-wpf-app
  • Run cd win-wpf/msix && focalboard.exe
• Mac:
  • Requires macOS 11.3+ and Xcode 13.2.1+
  • Run make prebuild
  • The above prebuild step needs to be run only when you make changes to or want to install your npm dependencies, etc.
  • Once the prebuild is completed, you can keep repeating the below steps to build the app & see the changes.
  • Run make mac-app
  • Run open mac/dist/Focalboard.app
• Linux:
  • Tested on Ubuntu 18.04
  • Install webgtk dependencies
    • Run sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev
    • Run sudo apt-get install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev
  • Run make prebuild
  • The above prebuild step needs to be run only when you make changes to or want to install your npm dependencies, etc.
  • Once the prebuild is completed, you can keep repeating the below steps to build the app & see the changes.
  • Run make linux-app
  • Uncompress linux/dist/focalboard-linux.tar.gz to a directory of your choice
  • Run focalboard-app from the directory you have chosen
• Docker:
  • To run it locally from offical image:
    • docker run -it -p 80:8000 mattermost/focalboard
  • To build it for your current architecture:
    • docker build -f docker/Dockerfile .
  • To build it for a custom architecture (experimental):
    • docker build -f docker/Dockerfile --platform linux/arm64 .

Cross-compilation currently isn't fully supported, so please build on the appropriate platform. Refer to the GitHub Actions workflows (build-mac.yml, build-win.yml, build-ubuntu.yml) for the detailed list of steps on each platform.

Unit testing

Before checking in commits, run make ci, which is similar to the .gitlab-ci.yml workflow and includes:

• Server unit tests: make server-test
• Web app ESLint: cd webapp; npm run check
• Web app unit tests: cd webapp; npm run test
• Web app UI tests: cd webapp; npm run cypress:ci

Translating

Help translate Focalboard! The app is already translated into several languages. We welcome corrections and new language translations! You can add new languages or improve existing translations at Weblate.

Staying informed

• Changes: See the CHANGELOG for the latest updates
• GitHub Discussions: Join the Developer Discussion board
• Bug Reports: File a bug report
• Chat: Join the Focalboard community channel