OpenBMC Web User Interface Development

Document Purpose: How to customize, build, and run the OpenBMC Web UI

Audience: Programmer familiar with HTML and AngularJS

Prerequisites: Current Linux, Mac, or Windows system

Overview

The phosphor-webui repository provides a web-based interface for an OpenBMC. The phosphor-webui uses the AngularJS framework to interact with the BMC via REST API calls. It allows users to view hardware information, update firmware, set network settings, and much more.

A common use case for changes to the web UI is to put some system specific branding into it. This lesson will focus on how to do that.

Load web UI against QEMU

  1. Connect to web UI in QEMU

You will need the QEMU session running per instructions in section "Download and Start QEMU Session" of dev-environment

Assuming you used the default of 2443 for the https port in your QEMU session, you will point your web browser to https://localhost:2443. Login with default userid and password and verify basic web UI features are working as expected.

Note You will need to approve the security exception in your browser to connect. OpenBMC is running with a self-signed SSL certificate. Accepting this is key for the next steps.

Customize web UI code

  1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/openbmc/phosphor-webui.git
  1. Install appropriate packages and start web UI

Follow the directions in the phosphor-webui README to install the required packages and start the web UI. You can use the development environment created in dev-environment or your own system assuming you install the required packages noted in the README.

  1. Customize the web UI login screen and verify

Kill your npm run from the previous step using Ctrl^C. Grab a png that you will use to represent your customized version of OpenBMC. Feel free to use any .png you wish for this step.

wget http://www.pngmart.com/files/3/Free-PNG-Transparent-Image.png

Copy your new .png into the appropriate directory

cp Free-PNG-Transparent-Image.png app/assets/images/

Point to that new image in the web UI HTML

vi app/login/controllers/login-controller.html
# Replace the logo.svg near the top with Free-PNG-Transparent-Image.png
<img src="../../assets/images/Free-PNG-Transparent-Image.png" class="login__logo" alt="OpenBMC logo" role="img"/>

Start up the server with your change

npm run-script server

Load web browser at https://localhost:8080 and verify your new image is on the login screen.

Kill your npm run using Ctrl^C.

  1. Customize the header with the new image and verify

The header is on every page in the web UI. It has a smaller version of the logo in it which we are changing with this step.

Similar to the previous step, modify the appropriate HTML for the header:

vi app/common/directives/app-header.html
# Replace logo.svg with Free-PNG-Transparent-Image.png again
<div class="logo__wrapper"><img src="../../assets/images/Free-PNG-Transparent-Image.png" class="header__logo" alt="company logo"/></div>

Start up the server with your change

npm run-script server

Browse to https://localhost:8080 and verify your new image is on the header. Note that you will need to log in to view the header. Point the web UI to your QEMU session by typing the QEMU session (e.g. localhost:2443) in the "BMC HOST OR BMC IP ADDRESS" field.

Note that in the HTML where you're replacing the images, there is also the corresponding text that goes with the images. Changing the text to match with your logo is also something you can easily do to customize your creation of an OpenBMC system.

And that's it! You've downloaded, customized, and run the OpenBMC phosphor-webui code!