Host Your Own Excalidraw: Real-time Whiteboarding on Rocky Linux 10 Installation Guide

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Excalidraw is a modern, open-source whiteboard tool designed for teams and individuals to create sketches, diagrams, wireframes, mind maps, and more — all in real time. Whether you're planning a software architecture, brainstorming ideas, or designing UI flows, Excalidraw makes collaboration simple and visual.

This guide will walk you through installing and running Excalidraw on Rocky Linux 10 using Docker, making it easy to self-host your own secure, private instance.

Prerequisites

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• Before starting, make sure you have:

• A server running Rocky Linux 10

• Root or sudo access

• A public IP or domain (optional, but useful for external access)

Basic understanding of Linux commands

Install Docker

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Docker is a platform for developing, shipping, and running applications using containerization. It allows you to package up an application with all its dependencies into a standardized unit called a container, which ensures that it will run consistently across different environments.

You can install the Docker using the following command:

It's always a good practice to start with updated packages:

dnf update -y

Install necessary utilities for managing repositories:

dnf install -y dnf-plugins-core

Add the official Docker repository (compatible with Rocky Linux):

dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo

Now, install Docker

dnf install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Start and Enable Docker service:

systemctl start docker
systemctl enable docker

Verify that Docker is installed correctly:

docker --version

Output:

[root@vps ~]# docker --version
Docker version 28.2.2, build e6534b4

Install Excalidraw using Docker:

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Now that Docker is installed, you can pull the Excalidraw Docker image and run it as a container.

docker pull docker.io/excalidraw/excalidraw:latest

Run the Excalidraw container in detached mode (-d) and map port 8080 on your host to port 80 on the container using the following command:

docker run -p 8080:80 -d docker.io/excalidraw/excalidraw:latest

Access Excalidraw:

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Now that Excalidraw is running as a Docker container, you can access it through a web browser by navigating to http://your_vps_ip:8080.

http://your_vps_ip:8080

Replace your_vps_ip with the actual IP address of your VPS.

Now, Excalidraw should be accessible on your VPS at the specified IP address and port.

That's it! You've successfully installed Excalidraw on your VPS using Docker. You can now start using Excalidraw to create and collaborate on diagrams and sketches in real-time.