Web UI guide

sudo ngxsetup web                        # binds 0.0.0.0, random port
sudo ngxsetup web --port 8443             # pin the port (open it ahead of time)
sudo ngxsetup web --bind 127.0.0.1        # local/VPN-only, e.g. behind an SSH tunnel

Everything the CLI can do, from a browser — for a day-to-day operator who should be able to create a site, watch resource usage, tail a log, run a security scan or restore a backup without a Linux shell account or SSH key of their own.

There is no login, on purpose

ngxsetup web is meant to be started in an operator's own active terminal session and to die with it — it must never be installed as a systemd service or left running unattended. The access control is "did you have a shell to start this command in the first place"; closing the terminal (or Ctrl+C) stops the server, closes the firewall port it opened, and ends the session.

Because there is no login, where you bind it matters: prefer --bind 127.0.0.1 behind an SSH tunnel, or a network only you can reach, over leaving --bind 0.0.0.0 (the default, chosen for the "not a Linux user, needs to reach it directly" case) open on a shared or public network — the tool prints this warning every time it starts.

Every mutating request still requires a same-origin fetch header (X-Requested-With), which a page in another tab cannot set, as a baseline guard against a background request from an unrelated site while the panel happens to be open. Destructive actions (removing a site, restoring a database, uninstalling) additionally require the browser-side confirmation dialog and, for the biggest ones, typing the exact domain name or the word UNINSTALL.

The certificate is self-signed (there is no domain name to request a real one for), so a browser will warn on first visit — expected, not a sign of a misconfigured server. The firewall port it ends up bound to is opened automatically for the session (via ufw, if present) and closed again on a clean shutdown, rather than requiring a manual ufw allow first.

What's in it

The dashboard, sidebar and forms are Tailwind CSS and Font Awesome, and resource charts (load average, memory, disk, per-site CPU and request rate) are Chart.js — all self-hosted and embedded in the binary, so the page loads with zero external requests even on a box with no internet access.

Log Viewer tails fail2ban, nginx access/error logs per site, PHP-FPM logs, the database's log and the system's auth log — either a snapshot of the last N lines or a live, polling tail — without ever reading more than a bounded window of a file no matter how large it has grown.

A site's Activity view (from the Sites page) shows currently-active PHP workers, request rate, distinct visitor IPs and a geography breakdown — the last one only if config set geoip_database_path <file> points at an operator-supplied MaxMind GeoLite2-Country .mmdb file; no geo database ships with ngxsetup itself, for the same reason no YARA ruleset beyond the small bundled one does (see Security).

Backups lists local database dumps with a download link for each, and covers the same Borg setup/status/backup/restore flow as the CLI — see Backups.

See Architecture → The web UI for how it's built.