Kanban is a lean method for project management that has been popular in software development and knowledge work. Recently, after reading a bunch of blog articles and technical booklets, I came up with an idea to use the Kanban method to manage my scientific projects. After all, speaking of the production of knowledge work, scientific research is analogous to manufacturing.
I came across a powerful open source Kanban software — Kanboard. It’s PHP and SQLite powered; and it has an intuitive user interface. It does not say that macOS is supported. But since PHP and Apache Web Server are shipped with macOS, there is no reason it cannot be installed on macOS.
After a bit of searching, I come up with a path of least resistance for installing Kanboard on macOS.
- Install MAMP on macOS. This is not always necessary, since macOS already comes with the Apache Web Server. But having MAMP makes configuring things easier for a non-expert in web development.
- Install SQLite. This can be done with Homebrew:
brew install sqlite. - Download the latest release of Kanboard. See http://kanboard.org/.
- In MAMP (not MAMP Pro), start the server. In “Preferences”, set the “Document Root” to the directory of Kanboard.
- The default port set by MAMP is 8888. The Kanboard site can now be reached from http://localhost:8888/kanboard.
Now I’ll try using the Kanban method to manage my academic output.
