Nextcloud Whiteboard

The official whiteboard app for Nextcloud. It allows users to create and share whiteboards with other users and collaborate in real-time.

You can create whiteboards in the files app and share and collaborate on them.

Features

• 🎨 Drawing shapes, writing text, connecting elements
• 📝 Real-time collaboration
• 💪 Strong foundation: We use Excalidraw as our base library

Backend

Standalone websocket server for Nextcloud Whiteboard

This is a standalone websocket server for the Nextcloud Whiteboard app. It is intended to be used as a standalone service that can be run in a container.

Both the server and the Nextcloud instance must be accessible from the same network and share a common secret key for JWT token generation.

On the Nextcloud side, the server must be configured through:

occ config:app:set whiteboard collabBackendUrl --value="http://nextcloud.local:3002"
occ config:app:set whiteboard jwt_secret_key --value="some-random"

Local node

This mode requires at least Node 20 and NPM 10 to be installed. You can clone this repository, checkout the release version matching your whiteboard app. The server can be run locally using the following command:

npm ci
JWT_SECRET_KEY="some-random" NEXTCLOUD_URL=http://nextcloud.local npm run server:start

Docker

Building the image

The image can be built using the following command:

docker build -t nextcloud-whiteboard-server

Running the server

The server requires the NEXTCLOUD_URL environment variable to be set to the URL of the Nextcloud instance that the Whiteboard app is installed on. The server will connect to the Nextcloud instance and listen for whiteboard events.

The server can be run in a container using the following command:

docker run -e JWT_SECRET_KEY=some-random -e NEXTCLOUD_URL=https://nextcloud.local --restart unless-stopped -d ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/whiteboard:release

Docker compose can also be used to run the server:

version: '3.7'
services:
  nextcloud-whiteboard-server:
    image: ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/whiteboard:release
    ports:
      - 3002:3002
    environment:
    environment:
      - NEXTCLOUD_URL=https://nextcloud.local
      - JWT_SECRET_KEY=some-random-key
      

Reverse proxy

Apache

ProxyPass /whiteboard http://localhost:3002/
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Upgrade} websocket [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Connection} upgrade [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?whiteboard/(.*) "ws://localhost:3002/$1" [P,L]

Nginx

location /whiteboard/ {
	proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
	proxy_set_header Host $host;
	
	proxy_pass http://localhost:3002;
	
	proxy_http_version 1.1;
	proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
	proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
}

Known issues

If the integration_whiteboard app was previously installed there might be a leftover non-standard mimetype configured. In this case opening the whiteboard may fail and a file is downloaded instead. Make sure to remove any entry in config/mimetypealiases.json mentioning whiteboard and run occ maintenance:mimetype:update-db and occ maintenance:mimetype:update-js.