This component attempts to be a "do everything" embedded webserver for OpenBMC.

The webserver implements a few distinct interfaces:

• DBus event websocket. Allows registering on changes to specific dbus paths, properties, and will send an event from the websocket if those filters match.
• OpenBMC DBus REST api. Allows direct, low interference, high fidelity access to dbus and the objects it represents.
• Serial: A serial websocket for interacting with the host serial console through websockets.
• Redfish: A protocol compliant, DBus to Redfish translator.
• KVM: A websocket based implementation of the RFB (VNC) frame buffer protocol intended to mate to webui-vue to provide a complete KVM implementation.

bmcweb at a protocol level supports http and https. TLS is supported through OpenSSL.

Bmcweb supports multiple authentication protocols:

• Basic authentication per RFC7617
• Cookie based authentication for authenticating against webui-vue
• Mutual TLS authentication based on OpenSSL
• Session authentication through webui-vue
• XToken based authentication conformant to Redfish DSP0266

Each of these types of authentication is able to be enabled or disabled both via runtime policy changes (through the relevant Redfish APIs) or via configure time options. All authentication mechanisms supporting username/password are routed to libpam, to allow for customization in authentication implementations.

All authorization in bmcweb is determined at routing time, and per route, and conform to the Redfish PrivilegeRegistry.

*Note: Non-Redfish functions are mapped to the closest equivalent Redfish privilege level.

bmcweb is configured per the meson build files. Available options are documented in meson_options.txt

meson setup builddir
ninja -C builddir

If any of the dependencies are not found on the host system during configuration, meson will automatically download them via its wrap dependencies mentioned in bmcweb/subprojects.

bmcweb relies on some on-system data for storage of persistent data that is internal to the process. Details on the exact data stored and when it is read/written can seen from the persistent_data namespace.

When SSL support is enabled and a usable certificate is not found, bmcweb will generate a self-signed a certificate before launching the server. Please see the bmcweb source code for details on the parameters this certificate is built with.

bmcweb is capable of aggregating resources from satellite BMCs. Refer to AGGREGATION.md for more information on how to enable and use this feature.