 Time here for more systems. And while we all love documentation and especially diagrams and visuals to go with how a network is laid out or how a process works, drawing those can be a little bit challenging. We're going to talk about the free and open source tool draw.io. It's been something I've used for years. I've used it a lot on this channel. And it's just a great tool you can download and start diagramming. And I'm going to give you some free tips on this, including some free templates. So go ahead and look in the description below for those and let's get started. I love the simplicity of the draw.io page. And before you think, well, if you can launch it from a web application, isn't it just like any other web application that could just go away or start charging me or take my data and do something I don't want them to do with it? Actually, no, this is where they're very different. First, there's a download option. You can download this as a desktop app for Linux for Windows for Mac. So it is cross platform. You can self host this as a web application. That's all on our GitHub as well. It's actually a plugin for a lot of other services, which is pretty cool. But one of the things I want to point out that's very important here is bring your own storage to our online tool. They actually don't have the ability to store your data. So that's not really an option where they hold the data for you. You have to decide what storage you want to connect it to so you can connect it to and the example I'm going to use is GitHub. But this will sync with a lot of other tools when they have that information down here as far as their integrations, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google, Atlassian, Notion, Git and Dropbox. So there's other storage providers you can provide or in the case of the way I'm doing it in my system, most of the time when I'm presenting things, I'm doing this on my desktop app version. So these are all different instances I have running just locally on my Linux machine here. But we're actually going to go ahead and flip it and open them up in the web browser to show you that the same and show you how I can use this with GitHub as an integration. And once you click the start now, it's going to ask you what storage you like to save it to or decide later because you don't have to connect it to a storage. Only if you want to save anything out of it, do you have to connect it to a storage? I'm going to go ahead and choose GitHub. And we can then from here, open an existing diagram or create a new one. Now I'll go ahead and open an existing one because I have a few different templates in here. So we'll go here and we'll go and open up like my bitwarden layout. And you may think this doesn't look exactly like it did in the bitwarden video that I did. Well, that's because we have to switch the appearance to dark. Now it looks a lot better. Now one thing I will note and I've turned this off already, but it will sometimes default depending on when you've last launched it to this improved contrast. If you do that, it's kind of strange looking and I don't recommend it. It makes some of the things a little bit harder to look at. I like the not improved contrast mode, but those are where those settings are an extra. Go ahead and open up another one. Like my HA proxy one and we'll say an open in this window here. And once again, this is opening right from my GitHub. Now let's make a change to one of these. So we'll go ahead and duplicate something. And we can go here to the client and just hit Ctrl D to duplicate it. Maybe you want to show that this client is talking to the internet here. Now one thing that you may notice is that's a really ugly line. Why not these pretty lines right here? So we're going to go ahead and click this one and we'll hit copy the style. That way when we do this and connect it, we can simply paste the style. And now it's a similar style to that one. But let's go ahead and go further and say set this as the default style. And then when we go from here, we're going to go ahead and up here. Great. Now it's the default style. Anytime I create a new line, it's going to follow the same style formats. This is why coming from some of these templates can be a lot handier when you're doing this. Now the flow option, I will at least point that out right here. So if you want this to flow the same way like it does there, that is not part of the style that it copies. You have to go down to the property and then go down here to flow animation, check the box, and the flow animation will work. And we're going to go ahead and delete that and delete that. So we don't really need that one in here. But when you're building the different templates and I have a lot of them, particularly in this HA proxy one, some of these you're going to find a little bit repeated. You're kind of seeing the behind the scenes of how I build the different draw.io diagrams by starting with one, maybe saving it as a new file because I'm using the desktop app and then copying them on there. And you have all these different tabs on here. But this is what makes it a lot easier though is just the fact that once you build these out and they all attach and the things move, it's just like any other commercial drawing program that you've probably used. It is pretty easy to start with these and keep iterating from there. Now some of the cool extra features besides the different shapes that we can just drag around over here and the different connectors and the normal features that you would expect. And also you can add quite a few different templates and more shape templates that they have in here. I will also point out that getting the data back out of here is actually really easy to do. For example, let's say we wanted to take this and bring it into another program as an image. Well, that's actually pretty easily done by going here and we just copy as image. This is one easy way to get the data out of here to be pasted into let's say a local desktop app. For example, I'm gonna go ahead and pull up Libre Office, grab the Libre Writer app and just paste this in because maybe you want to paste one of those diagrams in here. There's also the ability of course to export these out to PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, PDF, HTML, which is actually pretty cool because then you can just natively open these in the browser. So if I go ahead and do this, make a copy, light box, border color, the little details you want to set, go ahead and hit export. Where do we want to save this device? Draw an IO, HTML, where my device, so hit save, download started. I'm just gonna go ahead and open this in the Firefox browser because I'm not logged in on that one. And here we are in the Firefox browser where you can see this. And matter of fact, because I exported all of it, it actually has all the different pages in here, all exported into a standard browser format if you want to embed this in a page. And I can click on it to bring it back up to full screen. And matter of fact, I can then from here click the edit button. And this is going to launch just right into the web application. And once again, because this is a browser window I haven't signed into, we're gonna have to go into appearance and turn off that improved contrast. And now I can actually start editing this and then save it because I'm not signed into Firefox. It's going to actually ask me how do I want to do the saving? So if I click save, you can't save to them, it's going to say where do we'd like to save this, pick one of these things to log into or just hit download, hit okay, and you're back to using it. Now I only had two simple goals for this video. One was to introduce more people to draw an IO. And two, just to leave that link that you'll find in the description to my GitHub for all the templates that I've had, because a lot of people have asked me, can I have a copy of them? And well, absolutely, I just didn't really think about putting them all in one place. And now I have so they're all free, you can just download them or you can sign up for GitHub and fork it and then make that your GitHub repository is a starting point to start drawing things and maybe you want to follow along with one of the different drawings that I've used in one of my previous videos. Either way, love hearing from you, leave your thoughts and comments down below. Like and subscribe if you'd like to see more content from this channel and head over to LawrenceSystems.com and hit me up on the socials from there if you want to connect me in all the various ways. And of course, my forums at forums.laurancesystems.com. All right, and thanks.