Setting up Kanboard on Ubuntu

Starting from scratch on a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04.

First, update the system:

apt update
apt upgrade -y

There may be a kernel update that requires a reboot, but don't reboot yet.

Our Kanboard server will be hosted at kanboard.example.com so…

Edit /etc/hostname to be

kanboard

And add an entry to the hosts file pointing to your server's public IP, in this example 1.2.3.4:

127.0.0.1       localhost

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

# Public-facing IP
1.2.3.4 projects.example.com projects

# Create a regular user, follow the prompts
adduser johndoe
# Add user to sudo group
usermod -aG sudo johndoe
# Change to the user
su - johndoe
# Make the .ssh folder. Specifying the "mode" sets the permissions just like chmod.
mkdir -m 700 ~/.ssh
# Create the authorized_keys file and paste your public key in it.
vim ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
# Remove group/others permissions from authorized_keys
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Test that you can log in via SSH using your key. After confirming that it works, disable root login and password authentication for SSH. Open /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change PermitRootLogin and PasswordAuthentication to no.

Change the SSH port from 22 to something random Restart ssh:

systemctl restart ssh

We'll be using the PostgreSQL (postgres) database for Kanboard.

# Install the postgres packages
apt install postgresql-12 postgresql-contrib -y
 
# Switch to the postgres user
su - postgres
 
# Create database user for Kanboard (you will prompted to set a password, make it a good one)
createuser -P kanboard_user
 
# Create database for Kanboard
createdb kanboard_projects -O kanboard_user

Open /etc/postgresql/12/main/pg_hba.conf and add an entry for the Kanboard user/database. I put it below the default administrative login, so my pg_hba.conf looks like:

# ... other stuff above ...
# Database administrative login by Unix domain socket
local   all             postgres                                peer
# Kanboard
local   kanboard_projects kanboard_user                         md5
# ... more stuff below ...

Try to connect to the database:

# Reload postgres configuration
systemctl reload postgresql
# Connect to the kanboard database, you'll be prompted for the password
psql -U kanboard_user kanboard_projects

# Install apache packages
apt install apache2 -y 
 
# Disable the auto-indexing module
a2dismod autoindex
 
# Create kanboard html folders
mkdir -p /var/www/html/kanboard/{logs,public_html,public_html/plugins}

Create /etc/apache2/sites-available/kanboard.conf and paste the following into it:

# Apache configuration for kanboard
# John Woltman
# Based on LAMP stack example from Linode

KeepAlive On

# Recommended by Linode for a 2GB server, which projects currently is.
<IfModule prefork.c>
    StartServers        4
    MinSpareServers     20
    MaxSpareServers     40
    MaxClients          200
    MaxRequestsPerChild 4500
</IfModule>

<VirtualHost kanboard.example.com:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    ServerName kanboard.example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/kanboard/public_html/
    ErrorLog /var/www/html/kanboard/logs/error.log
    CustomLog /var/www/html/kanboard/logs/access.log combined
    <Directory /var/www/html/kanboard/public_html/>
        AllowOverride FileInfo Options=All,MultiViews AuthConfig
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

apt install -y php7.4 php7.4-cli php7.4-gd php7.4-json php7.4-pgsql php7.4-mbstring php7.4-xml

We'll install Kanboard under /opt

# Clone repo
git clone https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard /opt/kanboard
 
# Create data folders
mkdir -p /opt/kanboard/data/files/{avatars,tasks,thumbnails}
 
# Change the owner of the data folder to the apache user, www-data
chown -Rv www-data /opt/kanboard/data/
 
ln -s /opt/kanboard/assets /var/www/html/kanboard/public_html/
ln -s /opt/kanboard/.htaccess /var/www/html/kanboard/public_html/.htaccess 
ln -s /opt/kanboard/index.php /var/www/html/kanboard/public_html/index.php
ln -s /opt/kanboard/favicon.ico /var/www/html/kanboard/public_html/favicon.ico
ln -s /opt/kanboard/jsonrpc.php  /var/www/html/kanboard/public_html/jsonrpc.php
ln -s /opt/kanboard/robots.txt /var/www/html/kanboard/public_html/robots.txt