Spacedeck Open: a self-hosted collaborative whiteboard with rich media

What it was, and why it was opened up

Spacedeck Open is the free and open source version of Spacedeck, a web based, real time, collaborative whiteboard application with rich media support. The history is stated plainly. Spacedeck was developed in 6 major releases during Autumn 2011 until the end of 2016, and it was originally a commercial SaaS. The spacedeck.com online service was shut down on May 1st 2018, and the decision was made to open-source Spacedeck to allow educational and other organisations who currently rely on it to migrate to a self-hosted or local version. MNT Research GmbH restarted development of Spacedeck Open in 2020. The developers were Lukas F. Hartmann and Martin Güther. The primary language is JavaScript, the licence is AGPL-3.0, the default branch is `mnt`, and the last push was on 2026-10-07. The repository has no GitHub releases, so the version marker is the package version of 1.0.0 in the manifest, and the site itself is at port 9666.

The feature set, and what is listed as broken

The features are listed in eight lines and they describe a whiteboard rather than a diagram tool. You create virtual whiteboards called Spaces with virtually unlimited size. You can drag and drop images, videos and audio from your computer or the web. You write and format text with full control over fonts, colours and style. You draw, annotate and highlight with included graphical shapes. You can turn a Space into a zooming presentation. You collaborate in realtime with teammates, students or friends. You share Spaces on the web or by email. And you export your work as printable PDF or ZIP. The last of those comes with a parenthetical that the export is currently being fixed and to stay tuned, which is the clearest signal in the README about the state of the code. The use cases given are education with virtual classwork and multimedia, creative work such as mood boards, brainstorming and design thinking, and visual note taking and planning.

Running it, and the requirement list that has drifted

The requirements section has an internal inconsistency worth knowing about, because it tells you the README has not been fully updated. The listed requirements are Node.js 18.x for the web server and API, Graphicsmagick, which on Linux is installed via a package manager, and optionally ffmpeg, audiowaveform and ghostscript. A few lines later the README says that to run Spacedeck you only need Node.JS 10.x. The manifest's `engines` field says `>=10.0.0`, which matches the older statement, while the Docker image is on node:18-alpine. So the code runs on modern Node and the requirement list is stale rather than the reverse. The install itself is the ordinary one, and it is a single command after cloning:

npm install

Then the server is started and you open http://localhost:9666 in a browser:

node spacedeck.js

The `start`, `dev` and `styles` scripts mirror that, with nodemon for development and gulp for the styles.

Configuration, storage and the two database options

Configuration lives in `config/default.json`, and the keys split into two groups. For storage, you set `storage_local_path` for a local sqlite database, or you set `storage_region`, `storage_bucket`, `storage_cdn` and `storage_endpoint` for AWS S3, with the note to omit a trailing slash for the endpoint. For mail, `mail_provider` may be one of `console` or `smtp`. The default storage behaviour is that media files are uploaded to the `storage` folder and the database is stored in `database.sqlite`. There is a Postgres option, though it is explicitly not officially supported, which needs the `pg` module and `storage_dialect` set to `postgres` along with host, database, username and password. The `db_logs_disabled` flag turns off the database logs, and the colour configuration is worth a look because it has a usability trap, since the custom swatches array should include the transparent swatch so users can remove the applied colour, and the default text, stroke and fill colours should also appear in the custom swatches palette.

The Docker image, and why Chromium is in it

The Dockerfile explains a lot about how the application works. The base is `node:18-alpine`, and it installs Chromium along with nss, freetype, harfbuzz, ca-certificates and ttf-freefont, then sets `PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD=true` and points `PUPPETEER_EXECUTABLE_PATH` at the installed browser. The reason is visible in the dependency list, where puppeteer sits alongside the media tooling. Chromium is used to render images and to produce the PDF and ZIP exports, so the server is a headless browser as much as a Node application. Graphicsmagick, ffmpeg and ghostscript are installed in the same layer, matching the optional dependencies for image conversion, video and audio conversion, and PDF import. The compose file mounts the `storage` and `database` directories and publishes 9666.

What the codebase looks like

The tree is a classic Express application from the period. There is `spacedeck.js` as the entry point, `routes/` for the HTTP layer, `models/` for the Sequelize models, `middlewares/` for the Express middleware, `helpers/`, `integrations/`, `views/` for the EJS templates and `locales/` for the translation files, which the `i18n-2` dependency supports. There is a `database/` directory for the migrations, run with umzug, and a `styles/` directory with the Sass that gulp compiles, and a `Gulpfile.js` at the root with the `styles` task. The dependency list is characteristic of the era, with `request` and `body-parser` for HTTP, `cheerio` for HTML parsing, `sanitize-html` for cleaning user HTML, `helmet` for security headers, `bcryptjs` for password hashing, `nodemailer` for mail, `archiver` for the ZIP export and `mock-aws-s3` for testing the S3 path. The copyright line reads Copyright (C) 2011-2018 Lukas F. Hartmann, Martin Güther, with the icons and original CSS design credited to Thomas Helbig, and the Spacedeck logo and brand assets registered as trademarks of Spacedeck GmbH.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Spacedeck Open if you need a self-hosted collaborative whiteboard with media support and were relying on the hosted service before it shut down, since the whole point of the open source release is to let organisations migrate to a local version. Skip it if you want a modern product with maintained releases, because the repository has no GitHub releases and the code dates from the 2011 to 2016 era. Before you deploy, note that it runs on Express with Sequelize over SQLite, that the Docker image needs Chromium, GraphicsMagick, ffmpeg and ghostscript, and that PDF and ZIP export is listed as currently being fixed.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: AGPL-3.0
3. README
4. spacedeck/spacedeck-open on GitHub