paca

What is Paca?

Paca is a self-hosted project management platform where AI agents and humans collaborate as equal teammates inside a Scrum team — not as chatbots bolted on the side.

Jira gives you a backlog. ClickUp gives you automations. Monday gives you dashboards. Paca gives your AI agents a seat at the table. They join sprint planning, pick up tasks from the board, write BDD specs, and adapt alongside humans in real time.

Everything about Paca — its workflow, its data model, its UI — is configurable and extendable via plugins.

Why Paca?

Core Idea: Humans and AI Agents, One Scrum Team

The central insight behind Paca is that AI agents should participate in the Scrum process, not just generate output in isolation.

In Paca, AI agents:

• Are assigned to sprints and appear on the Scrumban board alongside human teammates
• Pick up tasks from the backlog and update their status in real time
• Collaborate on BDD specs — helping Product Owners and BAs write Gherkin scenarios
• Contribute to System Design Documents — keeping the architecture visible to the whole team
• Probe, sense, and respond to emerging complexity, just like a human would

This is not automation. It is genuine collaboration — rooted in the Cynefin / Stacey framework's recognition that complex domains require teams, not pipelines.

Fully Customizable — Configuration and Plugins

Paca ships as a small, focused core. Everything else is optional.

Configuration-driven: workflows, statuses, field definitions, board layouts, sprint rules, and agent behavior are all driven by project-level configuration files. No code needed to adapt Paca to your team's process.

Plugin system: extend or replace any part of Paca via plugins. Plugins are compiled to WebAssembly (WASM) for the backend (write in Go, Rust, AssemblyScript — anything with a WASM target) and standard module bundles for the frontend. Plugins run in a sandboxed environment with a capability-based permission model; they declare exactly what host functions they need, and nothing more.

plugins/
├── backend/        # WASM modules — add custom routes, logic, data models
└── frontend/       # UI modules — add custom pages, board views, widgets

Browse and install community plugins directly from the Plugin Marketplace inside the Paca UI — no command line required. Go to Settings → Plugins → Marketplace, find a plugin, and click Install.

For local development or custom plugins, you can also install from the filesystem:

./scripts/install-local-plugin.sh ./my-plugin --api-key <your-api-key>

The P-A-C-A Cycle

Paca structures team collaboration around four phases that mirror both Scrum and the scientific method:

Plan  →  Act  →  Check  →  Adapt
  ↑                             |
  └─────────────────────────────┘

What's New in v0.4.0

• In-app AI chat — chat with AI agents at the project level to plan work, create or update epics, stories, tasks, and documentation — all in plain English without leaving Paca

• Activity diff & revert — every field change in the activity pane now shows a before/after diff; one click reverts a change to its previous value

Key Features

• Unified Scrumban Board — humans and AI agents share a single real-time board; no separate "AI workspace"
• In-app AI chat — chat with AI agents at the project level to plan work, create or update epics, stories, tasks, and documentation in plain English
• Activity diff & revert — see a visual diff for every field change in the activity pane and revert any change with one click
• BDD Collaboration — Gherkin scenario editor co-authored by POs, BAs, and AI agents
• System Design Documents (SDD) — living architecture docs that keep AI agents contextually grounded
• MCP Server — connect Claude, custom agents, or any MCP-compatible tool directly into Paca's data layer
• Claude Code skill — /paca slash command for Claude Code; manage tasks, docs, and sprints in plain English without leaving your editor
• Real-time updates — Socket.IO delivery; everyone sees changes the moment they happen
• OpenHands-powered agents — AI agents run on the OpenHands SDK; each agent executes inside its own isolated sandbox container so your host environment is never touched
• WASM plugin sandbox — extend Paca safely; plugins cannot escape their declared permissions
• Self-hosted — runs on a single Docker Compose command; your data never leaves your infrastructure
• Lightweight by default — minimal core, no feature bloat; add only what your team actually needs

Getting Started

Option 1 — Interactive install script (recommended for production)

Runs on any Linux server with Docker. No repository clone required.

curl -fsSL https://github.com/Paca-AI/paca/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash

The script walks you through configuration interactively and starts the full stack. Open http://your-server-ip when it finishes.

Option 2 — Docker Compose (manual)

# 1. Create a directory and download the compose file
mkdir paca && cd paca
curl -fsSL https://github.com/Paca-AI/paca/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml
mkdir -p nginx
curl -fsSL https://github.com/Paca-AI/paca/releases/latest/download/gateway.conf -o nginx/gateway.conf

# 2. Create your environment file
cat > .env <<'EOF'
JWT_SECRET=<run: openssl rand -hex 32>
ADMIN_PASSWORD=<your-admin-password>
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<run: openssl rand -hex 32>
AGENT_API_KEY=<run: openssl rand -hex 32>
INTERNAL_API_KEY=<run: openssl rand -hex 32>
ENCRYPTION_KEY=<run: openssl rand -hex 32>
PUBLIC_URL=http://localhost
EOF

# 3. Start the stack
docker compose --env-file .env up -d

Open http://localhost — log in with admin and the password you set.

Customizing the stack: scale down services you don't need.

# External PostgreSQL (supply DATABASE_URL in .env)
docker compose --env-file .env up -d --scale postgres=0

# AWS S3 instead of MinIO (set STORAGE_PROVIDER=s3 in .env)
docker compose --env-file .env up -d --scale minio=0

# Without the AI agent (reduces resource usage)
docker compose --env-file .env up -d --scale ai-agent=0

Upgrading to a new version

From the directory where your docker-compose.yml lives:

docker compose pull
docker compose --env-file .env up -d

Database migrations run automatically on API startup.

Option 3 — Local development

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Paca-AI/paca.git && cd paca

# Start infrastructure dependencies (PostgreSQL + Valkey)
docker compose -f deploy/docker-compose.dev.yml up -d postgres valkey

# Or start the full dev stack in containers
docker compose -f deploy/docker