Excalidraw | Support by cloudimg

Overview

Excalidraw is an open source virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn-like diagrams. It gives you an infinite, intuitive canvas with a hand-drawn feel, a rich set of shapes, arrows, text and freehand drawing tools, a reusable shape library and real-time collaboration. This image delivers the official self-host Excalidraw frontend fully built and served, together with the bundled collaboration server, so a private team whiteboard is running within minutes of launch.

Application Stack

The Excalidraw single-page frontend built from source at the v0.18.1 release and served as a static bundle by nginx. The excalidraw-room collaboration server, a stateless socket.io broadcast server, installed and run by a dedicated unprivileged service account on loopback. A systemd service that starts the collaboration server on boot and restarts it on failure. An nginx reverse proxy that publishes the whiteboard and proxies the collaboration WebSocket on port 80 behind HTTP Basic authentication. The application is installed on a dedicated data disk so it is independently resizable.

Virtual Whiteboard

Draw shapes, arrows, lines, text and freehand strokes on an infinite canvas with a distinctive hand-drawn aesthetic. Group, align, lock and style elements, build flowcharts and wireframes, embed images, and save reusable items to the shape library. Diagrams are kept locally in your browser and can be exported to the Excalidraw scene format, PNG or SVG at any time.

Real-Time Collaboration

Start a live collaboration session and share the room with your team. The bundled collaboration server relays drawing updates and live cursors between everyone in the room in real time, fully self-hosted on the instance, so your boards never leave your appliance through a third party broadcast service.

Secure First Boot

Excalidraw has no built-in authentication, so the whole site is published behind an authenticating nginx proxy. On the first boot of your instance a one shot service generates a fresh admin password, unique to that instance, writes it into the nginx credentials file and writes the password to a root only file. No shared or default credentials ship in the image.

Ready To Use

The whiteboard is served on port 80 through nginx. Browse to the instance and sign in with the generated administrator credentials to start drawing immediately. Use the live collaboration button to invite teammates to the same board.

cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email and chat. Help with deployment, the collaboration server, the authenticating proxy, TLS termination, custom shape libraries and reverse proxy and DNS configuration.

Use Cases

Team diagramming and architecture sketches. Whiteboarding in remote meetings and workshops. Wireframes and UI mockups. Flowcharts and mind maps. Teaching and tutoring on a shared canvas. A private, self-hosted alternative to hosted whiteboard services.

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