How to quickly deploy the Taiga kanban platform with Docker

Taiga is an outstanding kanban solution that would serve any user or business well. Taiga is open source and offers all the features you need for project management via kanban. But Taiga is notoriously challenging to install … unless you make use of Docker.

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That’s right, you can fairly quickly deploy Taiga to your datacenter or a third-party cloud virtualized Linux server on your cloud host. 

Let me show you how.

What you’ll need

To make this work, you’ll need a running instance of an OS that supports Docker and a user with admin privileges. I’m going to demonstrate on Ubuntu Server 20.04, but you can make this work on just about any docker-supported platform.

How to install the necessary dependencies

The first thing we’ll do is take care of installing all of the dependencies. To do that, log into your server and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install docker.io git -y

Once the installation completes, start and enable the Docker service with:

sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker

Next, we need to install docker-compose, which can be done with the following two commands:

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/2.1.1/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

We now must add our user to the docker group with:

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Log out and log back in so the changes will take effect.

How to clone the Taiga repository

For our next trick, we’ll clone this Taiga Docker repository with:

git clone https://github.com/kaleidos-ventures/taiga-docker

Change into the newly created directory with:

cd taiga-docker

Make sure to check out the stable branch with;

git checkout stable

How to configure the deployment

Before we launch Taiga, we need to make a few configuration changes. This is much easier than it seems. Here’s what you do:

Open the Docker Compose file with:

nano docker-compose.yml

In that file, you’re going to change every instance of localhost and taiga-back-secret-key. Change every instance of localhost to the IP address of your server and change every instance of taiga-back-secret-key to a strong/unique password (it’s important that you change each instance to the same password).

Save and close the file. 

How to deploy Taiga

Within the taiga-docker directory, there are two easy-to-use scripts. The first launches the service, so issue the command:

./launch-all.sh

After the service launches (it’ll take a few minutes), you can then create an admin user with the command:

./taiga-manage.sh createsuperuser

You’ll be prompted for a username, email address and password for the admin user.

How to access Taiga

After you’ve created the admin user, open a web browser and point it to http://SERVER:9000 (where SERVER is the IP address of your hosting server) and you’ll be prompted for the new admin credentials. After successful authentication, you’ll find yourself on the Taiga main window (Figure A), where you can start working with your new kanban solution.

Figure A

Congratulations, you now have a flexible and powerful kanban platform to help keep your projects better managed and running smoothly.

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