Excalidraw Decrypt

CLI tool and library that allows fetching Excalidraw diagrams as Plain text from the Excalidraw public API, which can be used for storage and combined with other tools to render the diagrams.

Background

The library relies on the parameters obtained from Excalidraw shareable links, which have the following format

https://excalidraw.com/#json=documentID,decryptionKey

Install

Install using go toolchain

go install github.com/loveholidays/excalidraw-decrypt/cmd/excalidraw-decrypt@latest

Install using homebrew

brew install loveholidays/tap/excalidraw-decrypt

Install by downloading the binary from Github releases

Grab the latest OS/Arch compatible binary from our Releases page.

Usage

Use as a CLI tool

Given an Excalidraw shareable link, for example https://excalidraw.com/#json=pJK6JcJMr7LGOuy1NbCKP,YneEARvxllEU6vlDQfz81A you just need to run the tool in the command line, passing as an argument from the URL after #json=.

excalidraw-decrypt pJK6JcJMr7LGOuy1NbCKP,YneEARvxllEU6vlDQfz81A > my_diagram.excalidraw

Use as a library

Simply create a decrypter client and pass the same argument as a single string. Find an example on this codebase.

decrypter := excalidrawdecrypt.CreateShareableExcalidrawDecrypter()
plaintext, err := decrypter.Decrypt("pJK6JcJMr7LGOuy1NbCKP,YneEARvxllEU6vlDQfz81A")

Integration with Excalidraw

What if I want to import the plaintext in a new Excalidraw canvas?

You can import back the fetched plaintext diagram to excalidraw to continue editing, opening the file in Excalidraw

What if I want to continue editing the original document?

To continue editing the original document, simply visit the Excalidraw shareable link in a browser

Building

Requires go 1.22.2. Running make build will create an excalidraw-decrypt binary in the bin directory.

Decryption process

Using a public Excalidraw API to download the ciphered diagram:

https://json.excalidraw.com/api/v2/documentID

The downloaded diagram is decrypted using the decryptionKey from the shareable link.

The diagram in this shareable link paints the picture of the steps required to get the Excalidraw file in plaintext: https://excalidraw.com/#json=pJK6JcJMr7LGOuy1NbCKP,YneEARvxllEU6vlDQfz81A