Excalidraw Icons MCP: Architecture Diagrams With Real Vendor Icons

What is Excalidraw Icons MCP?

The README's demo shows an agent building a serverless AWS diagram step by step with Route 53, CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS and S3. The point is official icons instead of generic rectangles, drawn on a canvas the agent can see.

It runs as two processes: a canvas server with a web UI, REST API and WebSocket updates, and an MCP server that talks to it over stdio. Several agents can draw on the same canvas concurrently.

How it differs from the official Excalidraw MCP

• Programmatic control per element, with create, read, update and delete, instead of one shot prompt to diagram.
• A persistent canvas with describe_scene for text and get_canvas_screenshot for an image, so the agent can draw, look and adjust.
• Layout tools such as align_elements, distribute_elements and grouping, plus snapshot and restore.
• File I/O for .excalidraw JSON and a Mermaid conversion tool.

Where it fits

Best for

• Cloud and platform engineers who need diagrams with the right vendor icons, then a canvas they can refine by hand.
• Teams documenting systems alongside a design tool. Related: Penpot and Figma.
• Agents that also need to sketch architecture. Related: Framelink.

Watch out for

• Official AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI icon packs are user supplied. Kubernetes icons are bundled.
• The canvas stores elements in memory, so a restart clears them. Export scenes if you need persistence.
• The API has no built in authentication, so keep the default 127.0.0.1 binding unless you add network controls.

Use it with UiChemy

This server draws diagrams, not web pages. When the system you documented needs a WordPress front end, UiChemy's Composer builds it, and Figma to WordPress converts a design into the site. Click Get Started on uichemy.com.

Connect Excalidraw Icons MCP: Architecture Diagrams With Real Vendor Icons to your AI client

docker run -d -p 3000:3000 --name excalidraw-icons-canvas ghcr.io/iagogfe/excalidraw-icons-mcp-canvas:latest

1. Start the canvas first

   Run the canvas container above, or from source run npm ci, npm run build and PORT=3000 npm run canvas. Open the canvas in a browser.

2. Register the MCP server

   Use the JSON block for Cursor, Claude Desktop or Antigravity. In Claude Code run claude mcp add excalidraw --scope user -- docker run -i --rm -e EXPRESS_SERVER_URL=http://host.docker.internal:3000 -e ENABLE_CANVAS_SYNC=true ghcr.io/iagogfe/excalidraw-icons-mcp:latest. Codex CLI uses codex mcp add.

3. Supply vendor icons

   AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI packs are user supplied, as the Vendor Icons section of the README explains.

4. Optional skill

   Copy skills/excalidraw-skill into ~/.claude/skills or ~/.codex/skills for a workflow playbook and helper scripts.

Client configuration

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "excalidraw": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run", "-i", "--rm",
        "-e", "EXPRESS_SERVER_URL=http://host.docker.internal:3000",
        "-e", "ENABLE_CANVAS_SYNC=true",
        "ghcr.io/iagogfe/excalidraw-icons-mcp:latest"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Endpoints and ports

What you can do with it

• Real vendor iconsOfficial AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI packs, bundled Kubernetes icons, simple-icons, Tabler and Iconify are all searchable.
• See what was drawnStructured scene text plus a screenshot close the loop, so the agent can refine its own diagram.
• Per domain conventionsThe diagram guide returns canonical icons, boundary containers and shape semantics for each diagram type.
• Auto layout and validationBatch creation can arrange nodes, and a validator flags overlaps and crossing arrows.
• Snapshots and file I/OSave and restore canvas states, and move scenes in and out as .excalidraw JSON.
• Shareable linksOne tool uploads an encrypted scene to excalidraw.com and returns a URL.
• Multi agent canvasSeveral agents can draw on one canvas at the same time.
• REST fallbackThe agent skill falls back to HTTP endpoints when no MCP server is configured.

Tools it exposes

Frequently asked questions