Boards

English | Русский

Self-hosted multi-board Excalidraw: a personal "Excalidraw+" on your own server — one Docker container, no accounts, no database. With an optional AI assistant that draws on your boards.

Features

• Multiple boards — a dashboard with live thumbnails, inline rename, tilt-on-hover paper cards
• Everyone gets their own boards — anonymous cookie identity, zero signup
• Share by link — separate edit and view-only links, revocable at any time
• Realtime co-drawing — WebSocket rooms, edits merged via reconcileElements
• Live cursors & follow mode — Miro-style presence with name tags; click an avatar to follow their camera. Game-netcode smoothing: adaptive jitter buffer, Catmull-Rom splines, dead reckoning
• Version history — auto-snapshots every 10 minutes of work, visual preview, one-click restore
• Trash — soft delete, restore within 30 days, then auto-purge
• PWA — installs on phone and desktop like an app
• English & Russian UI — auto-detected from the browser, switchable on the dashboard

AI assistant (optional)

A chat panel beside the board: ask it to draw a diagram, lay ideas out as sticky notes, recolor, align, or tidy up — it sees the live scene and draws right onto it. Voice input via an external ASR service.

• Runs on a Claude subscription via the Claude Agent SDK — a sidecar container (agent/) that needs an authorized Claude CLI on the host (its ~/.claude OAuth creds are mounted in). No API keys.
• Tools (get_scene, add_mermaid, add_elements, update_elements, delete_elements, zoom_to) are relayed over WebSocket and executed in the user's browser against the live excalidrawAPI — the assistant's edits go through the normal collab sync: every participant sees them, and Ctrl/Cmd+Z works.
• Each board keeps its own conversation (survives page reloads, resets after 12 h idle).
• Available to the board owner and edit-link collaborators; view-only visitors don't get it.
• Without the agent container the app just works as usual — the chat simply isn't there.

Stack

• Frontend: Vite + React 19 + @excalidraw/excalidraw (+ @excalidraw/mermaid-to-excalidraw, lazy-loaded)
• Backend: zero-framework Node.js (server.js) + ws; boards stored as JSON files
• Assistant: FastAPI + claude-agent-sdk sidecar (agent/)
• Deploy: Docker Compose, data in volumes

Quick start

npm install
npm run build
docker compose up -d --build
# app at http://localhost:48372

For the AI assistant, make sure the host has an authorized Claude CLI (~/.claude), and optionally set ASR_UPSTREAM for voice input (see below).

Development:

node server.js          # API + WS on :3199
npm run dev             # Vite with a proxy to :3199

Environment variables

Variable	Default	What it does
PORT / DATA_DIR	3199 / /data	app port and data dir (see docker-compose.yml)
AGENT_UPSTREAM	agent:8000	assistant sidecar address; empty — assistant off
CLAUDE_MODEL	sonnet	assistant model (sonnet/opus/haiku)
CLAUDE_DIR / CLAUDE_JSON	~/.claude / ~/.claude.json	Claude CLI creds mounted into the sidecar
ASR_UPSTREAM	—	speech-to-text endpoint URL (multipart field audio, WAV 16 kHz); empty — no mic button
TZ	Europe/Moscow	sidecar timezone

Licenses

• This project — MIT
• Excalidraw — MIT © Excalidraw contributors
• Caveat font — SIL OFL 1.1

Not affiliated with Excalidraw — this is an independent self-hosted wrapper around their open-source editor.