Plane on my own server

2026-10-11

I wanted a project tracker on my own server, one that my coding agents can write to. I chose Plane Community Edition. The official Plane MCP server lets an agent file and update work items.

Trial first

I ran a trial on my laptop before the VPS. The stack has these services: web, admin, api, worker, beat-worker, migrator, a database, Redis, RabbitMQ, MinIO, and a proxy. I dropped the space and live services. I do not need public boards or live editing.

RAM, measured after the migrations:

• Trial on the laptop: about 1.8 GiB for the whole stack.
• On the VPS: about 1.1 GiB.

Sign-up off, one login

Public sign-up is off. I set ENABLE_SIGNUP=0 through the instance configuration endpoint. I never turn it on while the app is public.

Plane CE has no OIDC. My single sign-on service cannot log me into Plane. So Plane keeps its own login. Caddy puts single sign-on in front of /god-mode only, the instance admin area.

plane.example.com {
	@admin path /god-mode*
	handle @admin {
		import sso
		reverse_proxy plane-proxy:80
	}
	handle {
		reverse_proxy plane-proxy:80
	}
}

The localhost trap

Open the trial at http://localhost:8180, not by the numeric loopback address. Plane redirects to its WEB_URL. On a different host name, the browser drops the session cookie, and the login loops.

The MCP server

The official server runs over stdio:

PLANE_API_KEY=... PLANE_WORKSPACE_SLUG=my-workspace \
PLANE_BASE_URL=https://plane.example.com \
uvx plane-mcp-server stdio

I checked the tool count. Version 3.2.0 exposes 30 tools, and each tool takes an action argument. A web search had told me 77. That was wrong for this version.

Two limits

• The MCP tool workitem_relation returns HTTP 404 on CE. The REST path /work-items/<id>/relations/ works.
• The API allows 60 requests a minute per key. Failed requests count. I never poll in a tight loop.

What is still open

• The password change endpoint returns 404 on this version. I set the password in the Django shell.
• I should copy the compose file and the Caddy block into my infra repo. They live only on the server today.