draw 🖌

draw is a tiny in-memory collaborative whiteboard for the web. draw syncs pen strokes in real-time across all users in the room, as well as managing presence in real-time between all active users to show when users join and leave. I wouldn't call it production-ready, but it works well enough for my personal use cases of doodling with friends, and fits in a few megabytes of RAM.

I usually use it to share drawings and doodle together with friends on iPads with the Apple Pencil, and works quite well even on slow connections and devices.

It's built on...

• Torus as a light frontend UI library
• blocks.css to add some spice to the UI design
• Gorilla WebSocket for initiating and managing WebSocket connections, and as a simple web server

Deploy

Deployment is managed by systemd. Copy the draw.service file to /etc/systemd/system/draw.service and update:

• replace draw-user with your Linux user
• replace /home/draw-user/draw with your working directory (path to repository or a copy of static/)

Then start draw as a service:

systemctl daemon-reload # reload systemd script
systemctl start draw   # start draw server as a service