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Self-Hosting Excalidraw: Collaborative Whiteboarding

Excalidraw is a virtual whiteboard for sketching diagrams. Hand-drawn feel, real-time collaboration, and completely self-hostable.

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What Is Excalidraw?


Excalidraw is a virtual whiteboard that produces hand-drawn looking diagrams. It's become the go-to tool for technical diagrams, brainstorming, and visual communication.


Why Self-Host?


  • Excalidraw.com stores drawings in the browser or their cloud
  • Self-hosting means persistent storage on your server
  • Real-time collaboration through your own infrastructure
  • No third-party data access
  • Always available, no dependency on external services

    • Features


    Drawing Tools

  • Shapes: rectangles, circles, diamonds, arrows, lines
  • Text with multiple font sizes
  • Freehand drawing
  • Image embedding
  • Color and fill options

    • Collaboration

  • Real-time multi-user editing
  • See other users' cursors
  • No account needed to join a session

    • Export

  • PNG, SVG, and JSON formats
  • Copy to clipboard
  • Embed in other tools

    • Libraries

  • Community libraries with pre-made components
  • Create and share your own component libraries
  • Architecture diagrams, UI wireframes, network diagrams

    • Common Use Cases


    Architecture Diagrams

    Draw system architecture, data flow, and infrastructure diagrams with the friendly hand-drawn style.


    Brainstorming

    Visual brainstorming sessions with your team. Ideas, connections, groupings.


    UI Wireframes

    Quick wireframes for web and mobile interfaces.


    Meeting Notes

    Visual notes during meetings that are more engaging than text.


    Documentation

    Embed Excalidraw diagrams in your wiki or documentation.


    Deployment


    1. Deploy Excalidraw on TinyPod

    2. Access the whiteboard in your browser

    3. Share the link with collaborators

    4. Start drawing together in real-time


    Resources: 1 CPU, 512 MB RAM.


    Integration


    Excalidraw integrates with:

  • Outline (embed whiteboard drawings in docs)
  • Notion
  • Obsidian
  • VS Code (as an extension)

    • The hand-drawn style makes diagrams feel approachable rather than overly formal — perfect for technical communication that doesn't need to look like an enterprise architecture diagram.