Third-party Wekan Package for Debian

Wekan is an open-source kanban web service. See https://github.com/wekan/wekan for details.

This is a package for deploying Wekan on Debian Buster or Bullseye.

Disclaimer: This package is provided by a third party. It is not an official package from the Wekan project or the Debian project. It is automatically built from upstream releases without any review or testing. The package does not fully adhere to Debian packaging standards (especially regarding the vendoring of dependencies). It also does not follow the deployment recommendations of the Wekan project.

Prerequisite: Node.js 12

This only applies to Debian Buster. The Node.js version in Debian Bullseye is new enough.

Wekan requires at least version 12 of Node.js. The package in the official Debian repositories for Debian Buster is too old.

Enable nodesource.com Debian repo:

wget -q https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/nodesource.asc
echo "deb https://deb.nodesource.com/node_12.x buster main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list
apt update

Installing the Wekan package later automatically installs Node.js as a dependency.

Prerequisite: MongoDB

MongoDB is not available in the official Debian repositories. However, the MongoDB project provides a third-party repo for Debian.

MongoDB can be installed on the same system as Wekan or on a separate system. The default config in the Wekan package expects a local installation of MongoDB.

Enable the mongodb.org Debian repo, install the mongodb-org package, enable and start the mongod service:

wget https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-4.2.asc -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/mongodb.asc
echo "deb http://repo.mongodb.org/apt/debian buster/mongodb-org/4.2 main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list
apt update
apt install mongodb-org
systemctl enable mongod
systemctl start mongod

Note: At the time of writing there is no repo for Debian Bullseye on repo.mongodb.org. The Debian Buster repo seems to work fine on Bullseye.

Install and Setup Wekan

Enable the infrapackages-wekan repo on https://packages.cccv.de/, then install the package wekan:

wget https://packages.cccv.de/docs/cccv-archive-key.gpg -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cccv-archive.asc
echo "deb https://packages.cccv.de/infrapackages-wekan bullseye main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cccv-wekan.list
apt update
apt install wekan

Customize the configuration in /etc/wekan.conf and restart Wekan with systemctl restart wekan.

Per default Wekan listens on http://localhost:3000/. Open http://localhost:3000/ in a webbrowser and create an account. The first account automatically has admin permissions.

Updates

Update the package with apt update && apt dist-upgrade. Wekan restarts automatically after updating. Database migrations run automatically during service startup. There is no way to downgrade the database. However, database migrations seem to be rare enough that downgrading the package will probably work in most cases.

Backups

It is sufficient to backup Wekan's MongoDB database (with mongodump) and the config file /etc/wekan.conf.