Deployment

Pre-built images are available on the Docker Hub.

Excalibee needs nothing but a port. You can verify it starts correctly via the following command:

docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 butterhosting/excalibee

A more realistic setup mounts a local directory at /opt/excalibee/data, so the SQLite database holding your drawings survives container restarts:

services:
  excalibee:
    image: butterhosting/excalibee
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - ./.htpasswd:/opt/excalibee/.htpasswd:ro
      - /host-data/excalibee:/opt/excalibee/data
    environment:
      EXCALIBEE_TIMEZONE: "Europe/Amsterdam"

Environment vars

When starting Excalibee, the following environment variables can be specified.

Variable	Options	Description
`EXCALIBEE_LOGGING`	`debug`, `info`, `warn`, `error` (default `info`)	Specifies Excalibee's own logging level
`EXCALIBEE_TIMEZONE`	IANA time zone (default `UTC`)	Specifies the timezone used by the server
`EXCALIBEE_SUPPORT_TOKEN`	optional	Specifies an Excalibee support token; click here for more information

.htpasswd

Excalibee supports HTTP Basic Authentication out of the box. To enable it, place a passwords file at /opt/excalibee/.htpasswd using the standard Apache format with bcrypt hashes.

alice:$2b$10$0EhE06AyBn4shMGqCkJzqOIPGsYCJxO2mzbgCbfFQ4te5003PiYOK
bob:$2b$10$LbAfTfDmhD9SbroH.JVrc.uUpfNxVDDtjPDTvwE7UaCNnn3PxrQF2

Which can be created as follows:

htpasswd -B -c .htpasswd alice

If no passwords file is present, authentication is disabled. For any deployment exposed to the internet, you should either provide an .htpasswd or place Excalibee behind a reverse proxy that handles it.

/data/

The /opt/excalibee/data/ directory stores Excalibee's internal SQLite database, drawings, thumbnails and any custom images.

Losing the data/ directory means losing all of your drawings, so it's strongly recommended to mount /opt/excalibee/data/ as a persistent volume.

Backups

Make sure the /data/ directory mentioned above is mounted as a host directory, for example -v /host-data/excalibee:/opt/excalibee/data. Backups are then straightforward:

Stop the Excalibee container
Copy the entire data directory to your backup destination, for example rsync -a /host-data/excalibee/ /host-backups/excalibee/
Start the Excalibee container

Restores are the same steps in reverse:

Stop the Excalibee container
Replace the entire data directory with the backup, for example rsync -a --delete /host-backups/excalibee/ /host-data/excalibee/
Start the Excalibee container

Two things matter in both directions: Excalibee must stay offline for as long as the copy runs, and the /data/ directory is always copied or replaced in its entirety. Previous backups must be restored into the same or a newer version of Excalibee.