Taiga

Taiga is a self‑hosted, open‑source platform engineered to support cross‑functional Agile teams. From a developer’s standpoint it functions as a full‑stack microservice ecosystem that exposes RESTful APIs, GraphQL endpoints, and WebSocket feeds for real‑time updates. The core goal is to provide a modular back‑end that can be embedded in CI/CD pipelines, integrated with issue trackers, or extended via a plugin marketplace. The system’s architecture is deliberately decoupled: the front‑end communicates with a Django‑based API layer, while background jobs are handled by Celery workers. This separation allows developers to scale components independently and swap out services (e.g., replacing the default PostgreSQL database with a cloud‑native instance) without touching the business logic.

Key Features

• Scrum & Kanban boards with drag‑and‑drop, customizable swimlanes, and priority queues.
• User stories, tasks, bugs as first‑class entities with rich metadata (labels, estimates, attachments).
• Time tracking & burndown charts that can be queried via API for custom reporting tools.
• Real‑time notifications over WebSocket, enabling live dashboards and Slack integrations.

Technical Stack

• Back‑end: Python 3.x, Django 4.x, Django REST Framework, Graphene (GraphQL).
• Front‑end: Vue.js 3.x with Vuetify for material design components.
• Database: PostgreSQL (default), optional MongoDB or MySQL for legacy support.
• Background processing: Celery with Redis broker, RabbitMQ optional.
• Containerization: Official Docker images (docker-compose templates) and Helm charts for Kubernetes.
• Search: ElasticSearch integration for full‑text queries across stories and tasks.

Core Capabilities & APIs

Taiga exposes a RESTful API (v1.0) for CRUD operations on projects, stories, tasks, and users. The GraphQL API offers flexible querying with pagination, filtering, and aggregation. Webhooks can be registered per project to push events (e.g., story created, task status changed) to external services. The API authentication supports OAuth2 and JWT, allowing integration with corporate SSO providers.

Deployment & Infrastructure

The platform is designed for on‑premise or cloud deployments. A single Docker Compose file launches the API, worker, and database containers, while a separate Helm chart enables rolling updates on Kubernetes clusters. For high‑availability setups, the API can be load‑balanced behind Nginx or Traefik, and PostgreSQL can be replicated using Patroni. The Celery workers are horizontally scalable; adding more nodes automatically increases background job throughput.

Integration & Extensibility

Taiga’s plugin architecture lets developers add new endpoints or override existing views. The taiga-plugin package provides a minimal API for registering models, serializers, and URL routes. Custom dashboards can be built with Vue.js components that consume the public APIs. Webhooks and API tokens make it straightforward to connect Taiga with GitHub, GitLab, Jira, or custom CI tools. The open‑source nature means there is no vendor lock‑in; you can fork the repository and tailor the codebase to your internal processes.

Developer Experience

The documentation is comprehensive, with an API reference, deployment guides, and a developer‑contribution handbook. The community is active on GitHub (over 3k stars, >200 contributors) and Slack, providing quick support for integration questions. Configuration is driven by environment variables, making it easy to adapt to different deployment environments without code changes.

Use Cases

• Enterprise Agile Tool: Companies needing a self‑hosted, GDPR‑compliant solution for multiple product teams.
• CI/CD Pipeline Integration: Use Taiga’s APIs to auto‑create stories from commit messages or trigger builds on task completion.
• Custom Reporting: Pull data via GraphQL and feed it into a BI tool (Looker, PowerBI) for enterprise dashboards.
• Education & Training: Institutions can host Taiga to teach Agile practices while maintaining full control over data.

Advantages

• Performance & Scalability: Python/Django back‑end with asynchronous workers and ElasticSearch delivers low latency even for large projects.
• Flexibility: The microservice architecture allows swapping components (e.g., Redis → Kafka) without rewriting business logic.
• Licensing: MIT‑licensed, free for commercial use; no hidden costs or vendor lock‑in.
• Community & Ecosystem: A thriving plugin ecosystem and active issue tracker mean new features are rapidly adopted.

In summary, Taiga offers developers a robust, extensible foundation for building Agile project management solutions that can be tightly integrated into existing workflows while remaining fully under their control.