Install Plane

What Plane is

A project tool for companies that work in rounds. You create tasks, sort them in a list, drag them across a board, and group them into cycles, meaning periods of a couple of weeks where you decide what to get done. There are also modules for larger jobs and a simple wiki alongside.

Plane is built like the tools development companies use. You notice it: a task has status, priority, assignee, labels and links to other tasks. That is more structure than a company needs to work through a to-do list, and it is exactly right if you want to show a customer or an investor how you plan the work and follow up on it.

If you only need a board and a list, Vikunja is simpler and installs in ten minutes. Plane is for those of you who want to work the way development companies do.

This is a server program, and a big one

The other guides in this series cover one or three containers. Plane consists of fourteen parts that talk to each other: the web interface, an admin interface, an API, a service for simultaneous editing, two background workers, a database, a cache, a message queue, a file storage and a traffic router in front of everything.

You do not need to understand every part, but you do need to understand what it means: Plane wants a real machine. The project's own documentation states at least two processor cores and 4 GB of memory. On a simpler computer with 8 GB it works, but it will feel tired. A cloud server is a better home.

Docker must be in place before you start. If you do not have it, start with Install Docker.

Linux Mint, and Windows with Git Bash

Plane is not installed by writing your own compose file. The project provides a script that downloads the right files for you and then shows a menu where you start, stop and upgrade. That is the path the project itself supports, and the one you should take.

The script is written for bash. On Linux Mint, bash is already there. On Windows it is not, so you need Git for Windows, which installs the program Git Bash. Open Git Bash instead of PowerShell and then run exactly the same commands as on Mint:

mkdir plane-selfhost
cd plane-selfhost
curl -fsSL -o setup.sh https://github.com/makeplane/plane/releases/latest/download/setup.sh
chmod +x setup.sh
./setup.sh

The script downloads a compose file and a settings file to a folder called plane-app, and then shows the menu. Choose to install, wait while the images are downloaded, and then choose to start. The download is several gigabytes, so do not do it on a weak guest network just before you need to move on.

When everything is running, you reach Plane at http://localhost. The first account you register becomes the administrator.

The line you must fix right now

We ran the installation on September 17, 2026, and it stopped. The compose file points to a file storage service called MinIO, and the image it pulls is no longer available where the file is looking. The error looks like this:

pull access denied for minio/minio, repository does not exist
or may require 'docker login'

The fix is one line. Open plane-app/docker-compose.yaml in a text editor, find the line image: minio/minio:latest and replace it with:

    image: quay.io/minio/minio:latest

It is the same software from the same vendor, just pulled from their other distribution site. After the change, the installation went through for us, all fourteen parts started, and the login page responded.

One more thing can happen, and it is not a fault in Plane. If something else is already running on port 80 or 443 on the machine, the traffic router refuses to start with a message that the address is in use. We ran into that. The solution is two lines in the file plane-app/plane.env, for example LISTEN_HTTP_PORT=8090 and LISTEN_HTTPS_PORT=8443, followed by the start option in the menu again. Then you reach Plane at http://localhost:8090 instead.

Keep in mind that the script downloads a new compose file when you upgrade. Then your change disappears, and you have to make it again.

Three things to do first

1. Create a project and add ten real tasks. An empty Plane looks impressive and says nothing about how you actually work.
2. Start a two-week cycle and add only what you truly believe you will have time for. The cycle is the whole point of Plane, and it works only when you are honest in it.
3. Invite the rest of the company and set an owner on every task. A project tool that one person uses is a to-do list with extra steps.

The most common trap

Choosing Plane because it looks professional and then stopping using it in November. The tool requires someone to keep it updated: closing tasks, finishing cycles, moving what was not done. If nobody does that, Plane sits there with February's plan in May, and that is worse than nothing, because it looks like you have things under control.

So appoint one person in the company who is responsible for making sure the tasks are correct, and set aside fifteen minutes a week for it. If you cannot manage that fifteen minutes, choose a simpler tool instead. That is a perfectly reasonable decision.

The second thing to know concerns the backup. Data is spread across several volumes: the database in one, uploaded files in another. A copy of just one of them is not a copy of Plane. The menu in the script has an option called Backup Data, and it includes the database, the uploaded files, the queue and the cache at once. Use that instead of copying folders by hand.