Temporal Web UI

Nota bene: Temporal Web UI v1 has been deprecated since September 30, 2022. Temporal Web UI v2 is now generally available https://docs.temporal.io/web-ui/

Temporal is a distributed, scalable, durable, and highly available orchestration engine we developed at Uber Engineering to execute asynchronous long-running business logic in a scalable and resilient way.

This web UI is used to view workflows from Temporalio, see what's running, and explore and debug workflow executions.

For a video demo of how this looks, you can check our docs.

Getting Started

Configuration

Set these environment variables if you need to change their defaults

Variable	Description	Default
TEMPORAL_GRPC_ENDPOINT	String representing server gRPC endpoint	127.0.0.1:7233
TEMPORAL_WEB_PORT	HTTP port to serve on	8088
TEMPORAL_CONFIG_PATH	Path to config file, see configurations	./server/config.yml
TEMPORAL_PERMIT_WRITE_API	Boolean to permit write API methods such as Terminating Workflows	true
TEMPORAL_WEB_ROOT_PATH	The root path to serve the app under. Ex. "/test/"	/
TEMPORAL_HOT_RELOAD_PORT	HTTP port used by hot reloading in development	8081
TEMPORAL_HOT_RELOAD_TEST_PORT	HTTP port used by hot reloading in tests	8082
TEMPORAL_SESSION_SECRET	Secret used to hash the session with HMAC	"ensure secret in production"
TEMPORAL_EXTERNAL_SCRIPTS	Additional JavaScript tags to serve in the UI
TEMPORAL_GRPC_MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH	gRPC max message length (bytes)	4194304 (4mb)
TEMPORAL_CODEC_ENDPOINT	Codec Endpoint, explained below
TEMPORAL_CODEC_PASS_ACCESS_TOKEN	Send OIDC access token to Codec Server	false

Optional TLS configuration variables:

Variable	Description	Default
TEMPORAL_TLS_CERT_PATH	Certificate for the server to validate the client (web) identity
TEMPORAL_TLS_KEY_PATH	Private key for secure communication with the server
TEMPORAL_TLS_CA_PATH	Certificate authority (CA) certificate for the validation of server
TEMPORAL_TLS_ENABLE_HOST_VERIFICATION	Enables verification of the server certificate	true
TEMPORAL_TLS_SERVER_NAME	Target server that is used for TLS host verification
TEMPORAL_TLS_REFRESH_INTERVAL	How often to refresh TLS Certs, seconds	0
TEMPORAL_WEB_TLS_CERT_PATH	Certificate used to support HTTPS in the temporal web UI
TEMPORAL_WEB_TLS_KEY_PATH	Private key for supporting HTTPS in the temporal web UI

• To enable mutual TLS, you need to specify TEMPORAL_TLS_KEY_PATH and TEMPORAL_TLS_CERT_PATH.
• For server-side TLS you need to specify only TEMPORAL_TLS_CA_PATH.
• To Enable HTTPS in the temporal web UI, specify a TEMPORAL_WEB_TLS_CERT_PATH and a TEMPORAL_WEB_TLS_CERT_PATH value.

By default we will also verify your server hostname, matching it to TEMPORAL_TLS_SERVER_NAME. You can turn this off by setting TEMPORAL_TLS_ENABLE_HOST_VERIFICATION to false.

Setting TEMPORAL_TLS_REFRESH_INTERVAL will make the TLS certs reload every N seconds.

Configuring a Codec Endpoint (optional)

If you are using a codec on your workers to encrypt or compress Temporal Payloads you may wish to deploy a codec server so that your users can see the decoded Payloads while using Temporal Web. The samples for the Temporal SDK you are using for your application should include examples of how to build a codec server. Please let us know if this is not the case. Once you have a codec server running you can configure Temporal Web to use it to decode Payloads for a user in 2 ways:

1. Edit the server/config.yml file:

   codec:
     endpoint: https://codec.myorg.com

2. Set the environment variable TEMPORAL_CODEC_ENDPOINT to the URL for your remote codec server. This is often a more convenient option when running Temporal Web in a docker container.

Temporal Web will then configure it's UI to decode Payloads as appropriate via the codec.

Please note that requests to the codec server will be made from the user's browser directly, not via Temporal Web's server. This means that the Temporal Web server will never see the decoded Payloads and does not need to be able to connect to the codec server. This allows using codec servers on internal and secure networks while using an externally hosted Temporal Web instance, such that provided by Temporal Cloud.

Configuring Authentication (optional)

Note For proper security, your server needs to be secured as well and validate the JWT tokens that Temporal Web will be sending to server once users are authenticated. See security docs for details

Since v1.3, Temporal Web offers optional OAuth SSO authentication. You can enable it in 2 steps:

1. Edit the server/config.yml file:

   auth:
     enabled: true # Temporal Web checks this first before reading your provider config
     providers:
         - label: 'Auth0 oidc'                        # for internal use; in future may expose as button text
           type: oidc                                  # for futureproofing; only oidc is supported today
           issuer: https://myorg.us.auth0.com
           client_id: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
           client_secret: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
           scope: openid profile email
           audience: # identifier of the audience for an issued token (optional)
           callback_base_uri: http://localhost:8088
           pass_id_token: false # adds ID token as 'authorization-extras' header with every request to server

   Providing config.yml to Docker image

   If you are running Temporal Web from the docker image, you can provide your external config.yml to docker to override the internal config. Create config.yml file on your machine, for example at ~/Desktop/config.yml. Start the docker image, providing the path to your config.yml file using external volume flag (-v). Leave the path after the semicolon as is:

   docker run --network host -v ~/Desktop/config.yml:/usr/app/server/config.yml temporalio/web:latest

   In future, multiple Oauth providers may be supported, however for now we only read the first Oauth provider under the providers key above.

   Common Oauth Providers and their docs:

   • Auth0: https://auth0.com/docs/protocols/configure-okta-as-oauth2-identity-provider

   • Okta: https://help.okta.com/en/prod/Content/Topics/Apps/Apps_App_Integration_Wizard_OIDC.htm

     Troubleshooting note for Okta users:

     Some providers like Okta, have a race condition that may cause logins to occasionally fail. You can get around this by providing the full URL to the `openid-configuration` path as part of the `issuer` parameter:

       auth:
         enabled: true
         providers:
             - label: 'okta dev'
               type: oidc
               issuer: https://dev-xxxxxxx.okta.com/.well-known/openid-configuration
               ...

   • Keycloak: https://www.keycloak.org/getting-started/getting-started-docker

   • LoginRadius: https://www.loginradius.com/docs/developer/guide/oauth/

   • please feel free to PR or request more help on the Temporal Web repo

2. You will need to provide a redirect URL to your Oauth Provider. If you are hosting Temporal Web at http://localhost:8088 (this is configured by callback_base_uri in server/config.yml), then it is http://localhost:8088/auth/sso_callback.

   • By default, Temporal Web asks for 3 scopes, make sure your provider recognizes these or you may see scope-related errors:
     • openid required by some OIDC providers like auth0
     • profile for name
     • email for email

Running locally

temporal-web uses all the standard npm scripts to install dependencies, run the server, and run tests. Additionally to run locally with webpack hot reloading and other conveniences, use

make
npm run dev

You can then access Temporal Web at localhost:8088 (you can configure both the port and the path with TEMPORAL_WEB_PORT and TEMPORAL_WEB_ROOT_PATH per the config docs above).

For development and contributing to temporal-web, please see the contributing guide.

You may also use docker by pulling temporalio/web. It is also included in the Temporal server's local docker setup.

API

If you need to extend temporal-web to add middleware to the server, you can install temporal-web as a dependency, and it will export the Koa web server that has not yet been started or configured. It includes an additional init function that will then compose the built-in middleware. This gives you an option to add middleware before or after you call init so it will add the middleware at the beginning or the end of the chain, respectively.

init(options)

All options are optional.

useWebpack: If true, starts webpack and adds the middleware, otherwise if false, it assumes the UI bundle was already built and serves it statically. Defaults to process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production'.

logErrors: If true, thrown errors are logged to console.error. Defaults to true.

For example, here is how you would add a request count metric using uber-statsd-client:

var app = require('temporal-web');
var createStatsd = require('uber-statsd-client');
var sdc = createStatsd({
  host: 'statsd.example.com',
});

app
  .use(async function(ctx, next) {
    sdc.increment('http.request');
    await next();
  })
  .init()
  .listen(7000);

The webpack configuration is also exported as webpackConfig, and can be modified before calling init().

Licence

MIT License, please see LICENSE for details.