Users

Admins can reach the users page, where every registered account is listed. From there you can create, update or delete an account, and change anyone's role.

The first admin

The first administrator is created from the environment when the instance starts with no administrator at all:

NUXT_ADMIN_EMAIL=you@example.com
NUXT_ADMIN_PASSWORD=a-long-password
# Optional, shown in the interface. Defaults to "Administrator".
NUXT_ADMIN_NAME=Your Name

Start LokalBoards with those set and sign in with them. Change the password afterwards, and NUXT_ADMIN_PASSWORD can be removed from the environment — it is only read when the instance has no administrator.

A few things worth knowing about how this behaves:

  • It only acts when no administrator exists. Once one does, the variables are ignored, so a role you change in the interface is never quietly reapplied from a stale environment.
  • If the address already has an account, that account is promoted and its password is left alone. Nobody's password is ever overwritten from the environment.
  • Nothing is written to the log but the address — no password, no hash.
  • If the last administrator is ever deleted, restarting with these set restores access. It is a recovery hatch as much as a first run.

Agent accounts

An account can be marked as an AI agent, which gives it a bot icon wherever it appears. Nothing about its permissions changes — the marking is there so that a card moved or a comment written by an assistant is never mistaken for a colleague's work.

Exporting everything

Administrators can take the whole instance with them. ⋮ › Export all data on the users page downloads one zip holding:

  • boards/ — every board as JSON, archived ones included, in the same format as a single board's export
  • attachments/ — each board's files, in a folder per board
  • database.sql — the whole database, as SQL

The two halves answer different questions. The JSON is for reading, and for taking your work somewhere else. The SQL puts this instance back exactly as it was, accounts and all, into an empty database:

mysql -u lokalboards -p lokalboards < database.sql

Making one needs nothing but a browser: the app writes the SQL itself, so there is no MySQL client to install and no shell on the server to open.

A few things worth knowing:

  • Store the zip like the database. It holds everybody's work and the password hash of every account.
  • Everybody signs in again after a restore. Sign-in sessions and one-time verification codes are left out of the SQL — their tables are created, empty — because restoring them would bring back logins that had ended.
  • It starts at once. The zip is written while it downloads, so a large instance takes longer to finish rather than longer to begin.
  • It works with an API key issued by an administrator, so a scheduled job can fetch it. See Export.