Drawy: Self Hostable Collaborative Whiteboard with Supabase

Effortless, multi-tenant capable, collaborative whiteboards powered by Excalidraw and Supabase. Easily self-hostable, serverless-ready, and 100% free and open source.

🚀 Live Demo: drawy.pratyay.online | 📦 GitHub: Pratyay360/drawy

What is Drawy?

Drawy is a modern, full-featured collaborative drawing web application that packages the complete Excalidraw canvas into a lightweight, multi-tenant capable, and serverless friendly architecture.

While Excalidraw is an exceptional visual tool, self-hosting it typically comes with frustrating trade-offs:

Single-board limitations that require spinning up separate instances for each diagram.
Paid collaboration tiers or proprietary hosted services for team syncing.
Complex Docker setups requiring multi-container networking, reverse proxies, and stateful socket servers.

Drawy eliminates these pain points by offloading database persistence, authentication, and real-time syncing to Supabase, allowing you to deploy the entire frontend and backend to standard serverless hosts like Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare with zero DevOps overhead.

Key Features & Highlights

🎨 Full Excalidraw Experience: Includes all standard Excalidraw tools, handwriting styles, shapes, arrow bindings, and full compatibility with the official Excalidraw Libraries.
🗂️ Unlimited Multi-Board Management: Create, categorize, organize, and rename multiple independent whiteboards from a unified dashboard.
⚡ Real-Time Collaboration: Collaborative multi-cursor drawing and instant stroke synchronization powered by Supabase Realtime WebSockets.
🔒 Total Data Ownership: Run Drawy against your own Supabase instance and PostgreSQL database. Your proprietary architectural diagrams and team brainstorming sessions remain completely private.
🚀 Serverless Ready: Built with Nitro and TanStack Start for effortless zero-config deployment.

Architectural Stack

Drawy is engineered with a modern, high-performance web stack:

Component	Technology	Purpose
Canvas Engine	`@excalidraw/excalidraw`	Industry-standard vector drawing and sketching
Frontend Framework	TanStack Start + Vite	SSR-capable, type-safe full-stack application
Server Engine	Nitro Engine	Universal deployment adapters for any cloud runtime
Database & Auth	PostgreSQL (Supabase)	User accounts, board metadata, and document storage
Realtime Sync	Supabase Realtime	Low latency WebSockets for multi user stroke broadcast

Quickstart & Self-Hosting Guide

Deploy your own instance of Drawy in minutes:

1. One-Click Cloud Deployment

Deploy directly to your preferred cloud provider:

2. Manual Local Setup

Clone the repository and install dependencies using mise:

git clone https://github.com/Pratyay360/drawy.git
cd drawy

# Setup development dependencies
mise run dev

3. Environment Configuration

Copy the example environment configuration:

cp .env.example .env

Configure your Supabase credentials in .env:

VITE_SUPABASE_URL="https://your-project.supabase.co"
VITE_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY="your-anon-key"
SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY="your-service-role-key"

Start the development server:

npm run dev

The Drawy Ecosystem

Looking for different deployment patterns or offline capability? Explore the complete Drawy lineup:

Edition	Description	Sync Backend	Best For
Drawy	Full web collaboration app	Supabase (PostgreSQL + Realtime)	Team workspaces and multi-board setups
DrawyParty	Ultra-low latency edge whiteboard	Cloudflare PartyKit + PostgreSQL	High-speed global collaboration
Drawx	Native desktop application	100% Offline	Air gapped privacy and personal sketching