websockify was formerly named wsproxy and was part of the noVNC project.
At the most basic level, websockify just translates WebSockets traffic to normal socket traffic. Websockify accepts the WebSockets handshake, parses it, and then begins forwarding traffic between the client and the target in both directions.
Notable commits, announcements and news are posted to @noVNC
If you are a websockify developer/integrator/user (or want to be) please join the noVNC/websockify discussion group
Bugs and feature requests can be submitted via github issues.
If you want to show appreciation for websockify you could donate to a great non-profits such as: Compassion International, SIL, Habitat for Humanity, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Against Malaria Foundation, Nothing But Nets, etc. Please tweet @noVNC if you do.
Starting with websockify 0.5.0, only the HyBi / IETF 6455 WebSocket protocol is supported. There is no support for the older Base64 encoded data format.
To encrypt the traffic using the WebSocket 'wss://' URI scheme you need to
generate a certificate and key for Websockify to load. By default, Websockify
loads a certificate file name self.pem but the --cert=CERT and --key=KEY
options can override the file name. You can generate a self-signed certificate
using openssl. When asked for the common name, use the hostname of the server
where the proxy will be running:
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out self.pem -keyout self.pem
For a self-signed certificate to work, you need to make your client/browser understand it. You can do this by installing it as accepted certificate, or by using that same certificate for a HTTPS connection to which you navigate first and approve. Browsers generally don't give you the "trust certificate?" prompt by opening a WSS socket with invalid certificate, hence you need to have it acccept it by either of those two methods.
If you have a commercial/valid SSL certificate with one ore more intermediate
certificates, concat them into one file, server certificate first, then the
intermediate(s) from the CA, etc. Point to this file with the --cert option
and then also to the key with --key. Finally, use --ssl-only as needed.
The include/websock.js Javascript library library provides a Websock
object that is similar to the standard WebSocket object but Websock
enables communication with raw TCP sockets (i.e. the binary stream)
via websockify.
Websock has built-in receive queue buffering; the message event does not contain actual data but is simply a notification that there is new data available. Several rQ* methods are available to read binary data off of the receive queue.
The Websock API is documented on the websock.js API wiki page
See the "Wrap a Program" section below for an example of using Websock
and websockify as a browser telnet client (wstelnet.html).
These are not necessary for the basic operation.
-
Daemonizing: When the
-Doption is specified, websockify runs in the background as a daemon process. -
SSL (the wss:// WebSockets URI): This is detected automatically by websockify by sniffing the first byte sent from the client and then wrapping the socket if the data starts with '\x16' or '\x80' (indicating SSL).
-
Session recording: This feature that allows recording of the traffic sent and received from the client to a file using the
--recordoption. -
Mini-webserver: websockify can detect and respond to normal web requests on the same port as the WebSockets proxy. This functionality is activated with the
--web DIRoption where DIR is the root of the web directory to serve. -
Wrap a program: see the "Wrap a Program" section below.
-
Log files: websockify can save all logging information in a file. This functionality is activated with the
--log-file FILEoption where FILE is the file where the logs should be saved. -
Authentication plugins: websockify can demand authentication for websocket connections and, if you use
--web-auth, also for normal web requests. This functionality is activated with the--auth-plugin CLASSand--auth-source ARGoptions, where CLASS is usually one from auth_plugins.py and ARG is the plugin's configuration. -
Token plugins: a single instance of websockify can connect clients to multiple different pre-configured targets, depending on the token sent by the client using the
tokenURL parameter, or the hostname used to reach websockify, if you use--host-token. This functionality is activated with the--token-plugin CLASSand--token-source ARGoptions, where CLASS is usually one from token_plugins.py and ARG is the plugin's configuration.
The primary implementation of websockify is in python. There are
several alternate implementations in other languages (C, Node.js,
Clojure, Ruby) in the other/ subdirectory (with varying levels of
functionality).
In addition there are several other external projects that implement the websockify "protocol". See the alternate implementation Feature Matrix for more information.
In addition to proxying from a source address to a target address (which may be on a different system), websockify has the ability to launch a program on the local system and proxy WebSockets traffic to a normal TCP port owned/bound by the program.
The is accomplished with a small LD_PRELOAD library (rebind.so)
which intercepts bind() system calls by the program. The specified
port is moved to a new localhost/loopback free high port. websockify
then proxies WebSockets traffic directed to the original port to the
new (moved) port of the program.
The program wrap mode is invoked by replacing the target with --
followed by the program command line to wrap.
`./run 2023 -- PROGRAM ARGS`
The --wrap-mode option can be used to indicate what action to take
when the wrapped program exits or daemonizes.
Here is an example of using websockify to wrap the vncserver command (which backgrounds itself) for use with noVNC:
`./run 5901 --wrap-mode=ignore -- vncserver -geometry 1024x768 :1`
Here is an example of wrapping telnetd (from krb5-telnetd). telnetd exits after the connection closes so the wrap mode is set to respawn the command:
`sudo ./run 2023 --wrap-mode=respawn -- telnetd -debug 2023`
The wstelnet.html page demonstrates a simple WebSockets based telnet
client (use 'localhost' and '2023' for the host and port
respectively).
Download one of the releases or the latest development version, extract
it and run python setup.py install as root in the directory where you
extracted the files. Normally, this will also install numpy for better
performance, if you don't have it installed already. However, numpy is
optional. If you don't want to install numpy or if you can't compile it,
you can edit setup.py and remove the install_requires=['numpy'], line
before running python setup.py install.
Afterwards, websockify should be available in your path. Run
websockify --help to confirm it's installed correctly.
-
Install the build dependencies. On Ubuntu use this command:
sudo aptitude install python-dev bluetooth-dev -
At the top level of the websockify repostory, download, build and symlink the ssl module:
wget --no-check-certificate http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/ssl/ssl-1.15.tar.gztar xvzf ssl-1.15.tar.gzcd ssl-1.15makecd ../ln -sf ssl-1.15/build/lib.linux-*/ssl ssl