vibe-kanban

Overview

In a world where software engineers spend most of their time planning and reviewing coding agents, the most impactful way to ship more is to get faster at planning and review.

Vibe Kanban is built for this. Use kanban issues to plan work, either privately or with your team. When you're ready to begin, create workspaces where coding agents can execute.

• Plan with kanban issues — create, prioritise, and assign issues on a kanban board
• Run coding agents in workspaces — each workspace gives an agent a branch, a terminal, and a dev server
• Review diffs and leave inline comments — send feedback directly to the agent without leaving the UI
• Preview your app — built-in browser with devtools, inspect mode, and device emulation
• Switch between 10+ coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Amp, Cursor, OpenCode, Droid, CCR, and Qwen Code
• Create pull requests and merge — open PRs with AI-generated descriptions, review on GitHub, and merge

One command. Describe the work, review the diff, ship it.

npx vibe-kanban

Installation

Make sure you have authenticated with your favourite coding agent. A full list of supported coding agents can be found in the docs. Then in your terminal run:

npx vibe-kanban

Documentation

Head to the website for the latest documentation and user guides.

Self-Hosting

Want to host your own Vibe Kanban Cloud instance? See our self-hosting guide.

Support

We use GitHub Discussions for feature requests. Please open a discussion to create a feature request. For bugs please open an issue on this repo.

Contributing

We would prefer that ideas and changes are first raised with the core team via GitHub Discussions or Discord, where we can discuss implementation details and alignment with the existing roadmap. Please do not open PRs without first discussing your proposal with the team.

Development

Prerequisites

• Rust (latest stable)
• Node.js (>=20)
• pnpm (>=8)

Additional development tools:

cargo install cargo-watch
cargo install sqlx-cli

Install dependencies:

pnpm i

Running the dev server

pnpm run dev

This will start the backend and web app. A blank DB will be copied from the dev_assets_seed folder.

Building the web app

To build just the web app:

cd packages/local-web
pnpm run build

Build from source (macOS)

1. Run ./local-build.sh
2. Test with cd npx-cli && node bin/cli.js

Environment Variables

The following environment variables can be configured at build time or runtime:

Variable	Type	Default	Description
POSTHOG_API_KEY	Build-time	Empty	PostHog analytics API key (disables analytics if empty)
POSTHOG_API_ENDPOINT	Build-time	Empty	PostHog analytics endpoint (disables analytics if empty)
PORT	Runtime	Auto-assign	Production: Server port. Dev: Frontend port (backend uses PORT+1)
BACKEND_PORT	Runtime	0 (auto-assign)	Backend server port (dev mode only, overrides PORT+1)
FRONTEND_PORT	Runtime	3000	Frontend dev server port (dev mode only, overrides PORT)
HOST	Runtime	127.0.0.1	Backend server host
MCP_HOST	Runtime	Value of HOST	MCP server connection host (use 127.0.0.1 when HOST=0.0.0.0 on Windows)
MCP_PORT	Runtime	Value of BACKEND_PORT	MCP server connection port
DISABLE_WORKTREE_CLEANUP	Runtime	Not set	Disable all git worktree cleanup including orphan and expired workspace cleanup (for debugging)
VK_ALLOWED_ORIGINS	Runtime	Not set	Comma-separated list of origins that are allowed to make backend API requests (e.g., https://my-vibekanban-frontend.com)
VK_SHARED_API_BASE	Runtime	Not set	Base URL for the remote/cloud API used by the local desktop app
VK_SHARED_RELAY_API_BASE	Runtime	Not set	Base URL for the relay API used by tunnel-mode connections
VK_TUNNEL	Runtime	Not set	Enable relay tunnel mode when set (requires relay API base URL)

Build-time variables must be set when running pnpm run build. Runtime variables are read when the application starts.

Self-Hosting with a Reverse Proxy or Custom Domain

When running Vibe Kanban behind a reverse proxy (e.g., nginx, Caddy, Traefik) or on a custom domain, you must set the VK_ALLOWED_ORIGINS environment variable. Without this, the browser's Origin header won't match the backend's expected host, and API requests will be rejected with a 403 Forbidden error.

Set it to the full origin URL(s) where your frontend is accessible:

# Single origin
VK_ALLOWED_ORIGINS=https://vk.example.com

# Multiple origins (comma-separated)
VK_ALLOWED_ORIGINS=https://vk.example.com,https://vk-staging.example.com

Remote Deployment

When running Vibe Kanban on a remote server (e.g., via systemctl, Docker, or cloud hosting), you can configure your editor to open projects via SSH:

1. Access via tunnel: Use Cloudflare Tunnel, ngrok, or similar to expose the web UI
2. Configure remote SSH in Settings → Editor Integration:
   • Set Remote SSH Host to your server hostname or IP
   • Set Remote SSH User to your SSH username (optional)
3. Prerequisites:
   • SSH access from your local machine to the remote server
   • SSH keys configured (passwordless authentication)
   • VSCode Remote-SSH extension

When configured, the "Open in VSCode" buttons will generate URLs like vscode://vscode-remote/ssh-remote+user@host/path that open your local editor and connect to the remote server.

See the documentation for detailed setup instructions.