Slava Shabalin

Details I missed from this guide while setting up.

Intro (skippable)

I was trying to set up Focalboard Personal Server. Guide overall is straight forward, but I was struggluing BIG TIME. Maybe because I'm frontend rat, maybe because I'm stupid, maybe one is the consequence of another.

I figured it out in the end, but couple parts of in this guide got me good. Don't repeat my mistakes and be careful with these:

Mistake 1. Install the correct version

Those who wrote this guide knew what they were doing, I'm not. Guide says:

The example below uses the link for v0.15.0, but you’re encouraged to use the latest version in the release list

I've missed that initially and just copied command.

wget https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/releases/download/v0.15.0/focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz

Don't be like me, install appropriate version from GitHub.

In the time of writing this guide, latest version was v7.10.6.

So, for this case correct command would be:

wget https://github.com/mattermost-community/focalboard/releases/download/v7.10.6/focalboard-server-linux-amd64.tar.gz

BONUS to Mistake 1! Don't mix up releases

As I understood from docs, Focalboard can be:

plugin for Mattermost
standalone personal/development server

For example, release 8.0.0 is plugin ONLY. If you are setting personal server, use focalboard-server from the list of release assets.

Mistake 2. Use correct user/password in PostgreSQL

Being unfamiliar with postgres syntax, this command really confused me.

CREATE USER <b>boardsuser</b> WITH PASSWORD '<b>boardsuser-password</b>';

<b> tags are necessary? Are we doing HTML now? Should I be using quotes?

PostgreSQL docs informed me:

Create a user with a password:

CREATE USER davide WITH PASSWORD 'jw8s0F4';

So, if you want to create user "dude" with password "cool" you should:

CREATE USER dude WITH PASSWORD 'cool';

Password should be in quotes.

Mistake 3. Don't miss sneaky config

In the same step, you are setting up Focalboard config by adding next info:

"dbtype": "postgres",
"dbconfig": "postgres://boardsuser:boardsuser-password@localhost/boards?sslmode=disable&connect_timeout=10",

If you noticed - congrats. I didn't. You have to write your username and password you set up previously, not this boards-fella.

"dbtype": "postgres",
"dbconfig": "postgres://dude:cool@localhost/boards?sslmode=disable&connect_timeout=10",

Mistake 4. Configure db properly

Do I know how to do it properly? No.

But when I got to point of guide: curl localhost:8000 it returned me this majectic error.

curl: (7) Failed to connect to localhost port 8000 after 0 ms: Couldn't connect to server

I got no idea what was going on. Thanks for this helpful answer I learned command that could help me.

cd /opt/focalboard
./bin/focalboard-server

Output of this command was very informative. From it I learned that I messed the config (Mistake 3), but I also learned that:

error [2024-09-20 17:08:26.194 Z] Table creation / migration failed        caller="sqlstore/sqlstore.go:75" error="pq: permission denied for schema public"
fatal [2024-09-20 17:08:26.194 Z] server.NewStore ERROR                    caller="main/main.go:136" error="pq: permission denied for schema public"

So, something is wrong in db permission department. With a little bit help of fellow developers from SO, I found solution.

!WARNING! I don't know Postgres, so it might be some security issue, but at least it works.

postgres=# \c boards 
postgres=# GRANT CREATE ON SCHEMA public TO dude;

How I understand it - I needed to select correct target database (in our case - boards) and then grant CREATE to our user from previous steps(in our case - dude).

Conclusion

After all this hustle, I was able to access my Focalboard server.

I hope that helps (if not - good luck in further research).

Thank you for reading.