Move self-hosted Plane to managed Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, and S3

Plane depends on four services that ship with it. Postgres holds the data, Valkey is the Redis-compatible cache, RabbitMQ queues background jobs, and MinIO stores uploaded files.

By default, all four run as containers on Plane's own server, with their data on its disk.

Each service keeps its data in its own folder under /opt/plane/data. That is fine for getting started. For production, use managed services, with automatic backups, point-in-time recovery, and failover across zones.

Plane finds each service through plane.env: DATABASE_URL, REDIS_URL, AMQP_URL, and a USE_MINIO switch for files. Leave DATABASE_URL empty and Plane uses the bundled Postgres. Set it, and it wins over the separate Postgres keys.

1. Run sudo prime-cli configure with a flag for each service you replace. Postgres, Redis, and RabbitMQ each take a connection URL. S3 takes an access key, a bucket, a region, and an endpoint.

   sudo prime-cli configure \
     --database-url postgresql://plane:<password>@<postgres-host>:5432/plane \
     --redis-url redis://plane:<password>@<redis-host>:6379/0 \
     --amqp-url amqp://plane:<password>@<rabbitmq-host>:5672/plane \
     --s3-access-key-id <access-key-id> \
     --s3-bucket <bucket> \
     --s3-region <region> \
     --s3-endpoint https://s3.<region>.amazonaws.com
   

2. Leave out the secret key, and configure asks for it without showing what you type.

3. It lists the keys it will change in plane.env, with secrets masked, and asks before writing anything. The answer defaults to no.

4. Confirm, and it writes plane.env and restarts Plane, this time without the bundled Postgres, Valkey, and MinIO. The bundled RabbitMQ still starts and sits unused, even with an AMQP URL set.

5. To check, sudo prime-cli configure show lists what plane.env holds, with secrets masked.

To go back, sudo prime-cli configure --database-reset points Plane at the bundled Postgres again, as you left it.

The configure command changes settings and moves no data. On an instance people already use, move the data first.

Only Postgres and MinIO hold data to move. Valkey works as a cache and a queue, and RabbitMQ's messages are transient, so the new services can start empty.

Plane has to be offline, so plan a maintenance window.

1. Stop Plane with sudo prime-cli stop, then start only the bundled Postgres and MinIO.
2. pg_dump with -Fc writes the whole database to one compressed file.
3. Restore it into the managed database with pg_restore, --no-owner, and --no-privileges, in case the old roles do not exist there. Use Postgres 15 and its client tools, the version Plane ships.
4. Then mc mirror copies the uploads bucket from MinIO into your S3 bucket.
5. Last, run the configure command. Plane starts on the managed services, and the old copies stay on disk until you remove them.

Plane keeps uploads private. It hands out signed links that expire after an hour, so the bucket never needs public access.

Browsers upload to S3 and download from it directly, so give the bucket a CORS rule for your Plane domain. The access key needs to list the bucket, and to read, write, and delete its files. If browsers cannot reach the bucket, set USE_STORAGE_PROXY to 1, and Plane's API carries the files instead.

An instance first installed before version 1.4 started with a public bucket. Run update_bucket once to make it private. Files already in it stay public. On S3, the key also needs permission to set the bucket policy.

On Amazon EKS, IRSA or Pod Identity gives Plane an IAM role for S3 instead of keys. Leave both key settings out. Any key, even an empty one, wins over the role.

On Kubernetes, the Helm chart can read its passwords and keys from Kubernetes secrets, synced from AWS Secrets Manager or Vault. Both setups are in the docs.

Plane now runs on managed Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, and S3, with its data moved once and its files behind signed links.