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.

Note that this is the JavaScript version of websockify. The primary project is the Python version of websockify.

To run websockify-js:

cd websockify
npm install
./websockify.js [options] SOURCE_ADDR:PORT TARGET_ADDR:PORT

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.

To encrypt the traffic using the WebSocket 'wss://' URI scheme you need to generate a certificate and key for Websockify to load. The --cert=CERT and --key=KEY options are used to specify the file name for the certificate and key. 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 or 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.

The include/websock.js Javascript 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.