mattermost-community/focalboard

Focalboard is an open source, self-hosted alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana.

Summary

Focalboard is an open source, self-hosted project management tool positioned as an alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana. It ships as a Personal Desktop app for single users and a Personal Server for multi-user use. The README opens with a warning that this repository is currently not maintained.

What it is useful for

Focalboard is useful for engineers and small teams who want to run a kanban-style tracker on their own infrastructure rather than rely on a SaaS provider. Common use cases include personal todo management via the desktop app, small team project tracking on a self-hosted server, or as a base for an internal workflow tool with its own REST API. Swagger docs for the Boards API are included, and the project tags span kanban, project management, goal tracking, and collaboration.

How engineers can use it

For a quick local run, Docker is documented: docker run -it -p 80:8000 mattermost/focalboard. The README also documents a source build:

• Create an .env file in the focalboard directory containing EXCLUDE_ENTERPRISE="1".
• Run make prebuild, then make.
• Start the server with ./bin/focalboard-server.
• Open http://localhost:8000; the port is configured in config.json.

For web app changes, keep the server running, run make webapp in a second terminal, and reload the browser.

Platform-specific desktop builds are also documented. make win-wpf-app on Windows requires Windows 10 SDK 10.0.19041.0 and .NET 4.8, then cd win-wpf/msix && focalboard.exe. make mac-app on macOS requires macOS 11.3+ and Xcode 13.2.1+, then open mac/dist/Focalboard.app. make linux-app is tested on Ubuntu 18.04 with libgtk-3-dev and libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev; afterwards unpack linux/dist/focalboard-linux.tar.gz and run focalboard-app.

Before contributing, run make ci, which runs make server-test, npm run check (ESLint), npm run test (webapp unit tests), and npm run cypress:ci (UI tests).

Documented limitations: the repository is currently unmaintained, the license is listed as NOASSERTION, cross-compilation isn't fully supported so you must build on the target OS, and this repo only contains standalone Focalboard. The Mattermost plugin edition lives in a separate repository, and the README links a developer guide for fuller Personal Server setup instructions.