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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 3. Run make config-reset to generate the config/config.json file 4. Edit config/config.json: * Set ServiceSettings > SiteURL to http://localhost:8065 (docs) * Set ServiceSettings > EnableLocalMode to true (docs) * Set PluginSettings > EnableUploads to true (docs) 5. Add an ENV var MM_SERVICESETTINGS_SITEURL with the same site URL used in the config 6. 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