ernestocorona/kanboard-mcp

Kanboard, plug-and-play in any AI editor.
A Model Context Protocol server that brings your Kanboard board into Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Zed, and beyond — so your agent can read, plan, and update tasks the same way you would.
**39 typed tools · JSON-RPC batching · Dual authentication · TypeScript strict · 1016 tests**
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What it looks like
The same flow works for every kind of board work — pulling overdue tasks, opening a daily standup summary, breaking a doc into subtasks, or updating a comment on someone's PR. The agent picks the tools, you stay in the loop.
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Why Kanboard MCP
- **39 typed tools** across 9 groups — full CRUD on projects, columns, swimlanes, tasks, subtasks, comments, attachments, and members. No half-supported entities, no read-only stubs.
- **JSON-RPC 2.0 batching** — create up to 100 tasks in one HTTP round-trip. Turn an email, a meeting transcript, or a doc into a sprint backlog in seconds.
- **Dual authentication** — *personal token* (acts as you, with your Kanboard identity) or *application token* (service identity for CI, bots, and shared agents).
- **Walk-up project resolver** — drop one .kanboard.yaml at your repo root, every tool auto-resolves the project context. Switch repos, your agent switches boards.
- **Zero runtime HTTP dependencies** — native Node 22 fetch, 4 production deps total. Audit surface is intentionally tiny.
- **Pino structured logging with automatic secret redaction** — token values never reach stdout, stderr, or any log line, at any log level.
- **TypeScript strict mode** + **1016 unit tests** across 65 test files. Integration suite gated against accidental writes to non-sandbox projects.
- **Smart retries for reads only** — idempotent calls retry transparently on transient HTTP failures (429 / 502 / 503 / 504); mutations never retry.
- **Hard per-request timeouts** — every JSON-RPC call runs under AbortSignal.timeout() (default 15 s, configurable via KANBOARD_TIMEOUT_MS). Requests cannot hang the agent indefinitely — slow or unresponsive backends surface as a clean TimeoutError your agent can recover from.
- **Debuggable from day one** — speaks plain MCP over stdio, so the official MCP Inspector works out of the box. Inspect schemas, fire individual tool calls, watch JSON-RPC traffic in a browser UI. See Debugging with MCP Inspector.
60-second quick start
1. Get a Kanboard API token
In Kanboard: **Profile → API → Generate token** (personal mode), or **Settings → API → Application token** (app mode for service accounts).
2. Add Kanboard MCP to your client
**Recommended path: npx — zero install, always latest.** Drop this block into your MCP client config:
Restart your MCP client. Done — the 39 tools are now available to your agent.
> **Why npx?** It fetches @ernestocorona/kanboard-mcp from npm on demand, caches it locally, and runs it as the MCP server. You never run a separate install command, and you always get the latest published version — no upgrade chore, no $PATH to manage. This is also why step 3's selftest works without any prior install: npx handles the fetch transparently.
3. Verify
Expected output (exit 0 = ready):
Documentation
Full docs live in ./docs/ and follow the Diátaxis framework:
- **Tutorials** — hand-held walkthroughs to learn by doing.
- **How-to guides** — recipes for batching, multi-project setups, integration tests, and CI.
- **Reference** — exact contracts for every tool, every config knob, and every error.
- **Explanation** — the *why* behind authentication modes, the retry policy, and the batch architecture.
Start at the docs index to pick the right entry point.
Installation methods
**Just want it working?** Use the npx row (first entry below) — it's the recommended path for the vast majority of users. The other methods exist for specific use cases (frequent local runs, Bun/pnpm runtimes, production deployments, or hacking on the source).
| Method | When to use | Command |
|--------|-------------|---------|
| **npx** *(recommended)* | Most users. Zero install, always uses the latest published version. | npx -y @ernestocorona/kanboard-mcp |
| **Global install** | You run the server frequently and want a stable binary on $PATH. | npm i -g @ernestocorona/kanboard-mcp then kanboard-mcp |