pkanban MCP server

pkanban

A CLI-first Kanban board for humans and AI agents. (The "p" is silent, like in "pneumonia".)

Most users will connect to our hosted service at pkanban.pearachute.com. If you want to run your own server, see the Self-Hosting section below.

Quick Start

macOS, Linux, WSL:

curl -fsSL https://pkanban.pearachute.com/install.sh | sh

Windows PowerShell:

irm https://pkanban.pearachute.com/install.ps1 | iex

Windows CMD:

curl -fsSL https://pkanban.pearachute.com/install.cmd -o install.cmd && install.cmd && del install.cmd

The installer uses uv or pipx if you have one, and installs uv (which brings its own Python) if you don't. Already have Python? pip install pkanban works too.

The CLI connects to the hosted service at https://pkanban.pearachute.com by default, so you can log in right away:

pkanban login

Your browser opens on an approval page; click Approve and the terminal is signed in. Nothing secret is typed into the terminal, so this is also how to sign in an AI agent (pkanban login --no-wait, approve, then pkanban login again). Prefer a password? pkanban login prompts for one.

Self-hosting? Point the CLI at your own server first with

pkanban config --url http://localhost:8000 — see Self-Hosting.

Common Commands

# List your boards
pkanban board list

# Create a new board
pkanban board create "My Project"

# View a board with its columns and cards
pkanban board get 1

# Add a column
pkanban column create 1 "To Do" 0

# Add a card
pkanban card create 1 "First task" --description "Getting started"

# Share a board with a team
pkanban share 1 <team-id>

API Keys

For automation, CI/CD, or giving access to agents, use API keys instead of passwords:

# Create a key (shown only once!)
pkanban apikey create "CI Agent"

# Save it once; subsequent commands use it automatically
pkanban apikey save pkanban_abc123...
pkanban board list

# Or pass it per command
pkanban --api-key pkanban_abc123... board list

API keys can be revoked and reactivated at any time. They're stored securely (bcrypt-hashed) and track their last usage.

Scripting: JSON output

--json makes any command print the raw API response instead of formatted text, so scripts never have to scrape prose for values like IDs:

pkanban board create "Roadmap" --json
pkanban board get 1 --json | jq '.columns[] | {id, name}'

PKANBAN_OUTPUT=json does the same for a whole run:

export PKANBAN_OUTPUT=json

The flag works in either position (pkanban --json board list and pkanban board list --json are equivalent). In JSON mode stdout carries only the response, and errors go to stderr as {"error": ..., "status": ...} with a non-zero exit code — so stdout is always safe to pipe into a parser.

pkanban login --json deliberately omits the access token: it is already saved to ~/.pkanban.yaml, and stdout is what CI logs capture.

Command Reference

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.