Focalboard Plugin Developer’s Guide

Important: Effective September 15th, 2023, Mattermost Boards transitions to being fully community supported as the Focalboard Plugin. Mattermost will no longer be maintaining this plugin - this includes bug fixes and feature additions. Instead, the plugin is open-sourced and made available indefinitely for community contributions in GitHub.

To build your own version of it:

1. Build mattermost-plugin in the Focalboard repo
2. Upload it as a custom plugin to your Mattermost server

Here are the steps in more detail:

Building the Focalboard plugin

Fork the Focalboard repo, clone it locally, and follow the steps in the readme to set up your dev environment.

Install dependencies:

# First-time setup dependencies
cd mattermost-plugin/webapp
npm install --no-optional
cd ../..
make prebuild

Build the plugin:

# Build webapp
make webapp

# Build plugin
cd mattermost-plugin
make dist

Refer to the dev-release.yml workflow for the up-to-date commands that are run as part of CI.

Uploading the plugin to your server

You can manually upload the plugin to your Mattermost Server:

1. Enable custom plugins by setting PluginSettings > EnableUploads to true in the Mattermost config.json file
2. Navigate to System Console > Plugins > Management and upload the generated .tar.gz package in your mattermost-plugin/dist directory
3. Enable it (if needed)

Alternatively, you can install Mattermost locally and use make deploy to auto-deploy it for you:

First, build and run Mattermost locally:

1. Follow the Mattermost Developers Guide to set up your environment
   • In particuler, make sure Docker is set up and running
2. Fork mattermost-webapp, clone it locally, and make build
3. Fork mattermost-server and clone it locally
4. Run make config-reset to generate the config/config.json file
5. Edit config/config.json:
   • Set ServiceSettings > SiteURL to http://localhost:8065 (docs)
   • Set ServiceSettings > EnableLocalMode to true (docs)
   • Set PluginSettings > EnableUploads to true (docs)
6. Add an ENV var MM_SERVICESETTINGS_SITEURL with the same site URL used in the config
7. Run make run-server in Mattermost

Now, to build and deploy the plugin:

1. Clone / fork mattermost/focalboard
2. Install the dependencies (see above)
3. Run:

   make webapp
   cd mattermost-plugin
   make deploy