What is Kanboard

Kanboard is a free and open source Kanban project management software. Which we will be using today due to that premises.

In software development, the virtual Kanban system is used to track and limit the work in progress. Even though the name originates from the Japanese language “Kanban”, which roughly translates to “signal card”, and there are cards used in most software development Kanban implementations, these cards do not actually function as signals to get more work done. They represent the work items. Now being greatly adopted inside companies in addition to Agile frameworks and practices.

Installing PHP and PHP Libs

Time to install latest version of php and all of the required modules.

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sudo apt install -y php-cli php-common php-mbstring php-fpm \
    php-sqlite3 php-opcache php-json php-ldap php-gd php-xml  \
    php-mysql php-pgsql php-curl php-zip

Installing and configuring MariaDB

Kanobard uses SQLite by default, we are going to use MariaDB. In order to do this, first we need to download MariaDB.

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sudo apt install mariadb-server
sudo systemctl start mariadb
sudo systemctl enable mariadb

Later on, we need to create a database and an user inside MariaDB for kanboard to use. If we are downloading MariaDB for the first time, it is recommended to use run the following command in order to securely set up the DB:

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sudo mysql_secure_installation

Now we need to enter the database using this command while providing the needed root credentials.

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sudo mysql -u root -p

And create the database and the user via the following pastes:

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CREATE DATABASE kanboard CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON kanboard.* TO 'kanboard'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Installing and configuring apache2

In order to display our kanboard web service, we need to install the apache web server and the php mod.

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sudo apt install apache2 libapache2-mod-php
sudo systemctl start apache2
sudo systemctl enable apache2

Installing and configuring Kanboard

Now that we have all the prerequisites fullfilled, we can move on the actuall kanboard installation. We will download the code and extract it to the /var/www/html folder.

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wget https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard/archive/v1.2.15.tar.gz
sudo tar xzvf v1.2.15.tar.gz -C /var/www/html/
cd /var/www/html
sudo mv kanboard* kanboard
cd /var/www/html/kanboard
sudo cp config.default.php config.php

Now we must edit the config.php with the information of our database in order for the application to work. We can edit the following lines:

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...
define('PLUGIN_INSTALLER', true);
define('DB_DRIVER', 'mysql');
define('DB_USERNAME', 'kanboard');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'mypassword');
define('DB_HOSTNAME', 'localhost');
define('DB_NAME', 'kanboard');
...

Right after, we need to apply the right file permissions and ownership to the apache user, and restart the service.

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sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/kanboard/data
sudo service apache2 restart

In addition, we could create our own theme or modify an existing one. In our case it is: Nebula