excalidraw-render-cli

A command-line tool that renders Excalidraw drawings to SVG, PNG, and vector-first PDF, for a whole scene or frame by frame. It is a single native binary with every font bundled: no browser, Node.js, network access, or installed fonts.

Rendered with excalidraw-render overview.excalidraw -o overview.svg. Scene: overview.excalidraw from elastic/elasticsearch-specification, © Elastic and contributors, Apache-2.0.

The compatibility target is Excalidraw 0.18.1. Output is close to, but not pixel-identical with, the browser exporter; see the known limitations.

Install

cargo install --locked excalidraw-render-cli

This installs the excalidraw-render binary (Rust 1.92 or newer). Each GitHub release also carries prebuilt archives, each with a SHA-256 checksum, and a shell installer for Linux (x86-64 and ARM64, glibc and musl) and macOS (x86-64 and ARM64); only Linux x86-64 (glibc) is release-qualified.

Usage

excalidraw-render drawing.excalidraw -o drawing.svg
excalidraw-render drawing.excalidraw -o drawing.png --scale 2
excalidraw-render drawing.excalidraw -o drawing.pdf
excalidraw-render frames drawing.excalidraw --list
excalidraw-render frames drawing.excalidraw -o frames --format png

The output extension selects the format, or use --format. Input and output may be - for standard input and output. An existing output file is kept unless you pass --force; a device or pipe such as /dev/null is written to directly. For large drawings, --max-dimension 4096 bounds the PNG/PDF size; it replaces --scale, so pass one or the other. Very large drawings can exceed the PNG size limit; bound them this way or render to SVG or PDF.

frames --list prints the frames and the file names an export would write to standard output, one line of four tab-separated columns per frame: its number in the scene (counting from 1, whatever --name-regex selects), its kind (frame or magicframe), its name (empty if it has none) and the name of the file it would be written to (without an extension unless --format is given):

1	frame	Slide 1	Slide-1.png
2	magicframe		frame-2.png

--report-format json prints the same as one JSON document.

Warnings describe substitutions, omissions, and fallbacks the renderer made; --report-format json prints a machine-readable report. Run excalidraw-render --help and excalidraw-render frames --help for every option.

The command exits 0 when the artifact was delivered, even with warnings; 1 when reading, parsing, rendering, or writing failed, or an output already exists without --force; and 2 when the command line or a request value is invalid, such as a directory given as the output file. When a reader closes standard output early (| head), the command exits 1 without printing an error.

excalidraw-render --version prints the version and the Excalidraw release it matches; add --verbose for the exact compatibility revision and profile digest.

Guides

• Getting started: a first render, step by step.
• Command-line guide: every option by task, the JSON report and scripting.
• Exporting frames: one file per frame, and slide decks.

License

Code is licensed under either of MIT or Apache-2.0 at your option. The binary bundles fonts and adapted third-party code under their own licenses, collected in LICENSE-BUNDLE.txt.