From Friday, April 19th (11:00 PM CDT) through Saturday, April 20th (2:00 PM CDT), 2024, ni.com will undergo system upgrades that may result in temporary service interruption.
We appreciate your patience as we improve our online experience.
Example Code
Quick Backround
Web services were introduced in LabVIEW 8.6. They enable you to connect to LabVIEW using standard RESTful web services. To put it simply, if you can talk over HTTP, you can talk to LabVIEW using Web services. If you're not familiar with this, or want more information, I recommend reading this article and consulting these FAQ. Once you have successfully setup a secure server, the same steps are followed to deploy a VI as a Web Service.
Turning on SSL
Navigate to Tools >> Options and select 1) Web Server, 2) Enable Web Server 3) Create a New Server, since SSL cannot run on the default port 80, 4) I recommend setting the port to 443, since this is the default port for SSL. If you don't do this, you'll have to type the port after the ip address of the server.
Then scroll down and 5) Select SSL and 6) Click Okay. You can leave the certificate file dialog blank if you intend to use the default file.
At this point, you have enabled the server, but we need to go back and discover the certificate. After closing this dialog, open it again by selecting 'Tools >> Options.' Go back to the screen shown above and click 'Query.' If this works, the SSL certificate File location should populate as shown below:
To check to make sure the server is running, go back to the Tools menu and select 'Distributed System Manager.' If the server is setup and working properly, you should see something that looks like this:
If for some reason this doesn't appear to work, go back to the web server configuration dialog in the option menu and try disabling and re-enabling the server. You'll know it's working when you can go to a browser and type in "https://127.0.0.1" Note the use of "https" instead of "http," which tells the browser that it is a secure connection and defaults the port to 443. To use any other port, you will need to append it to the ip address, like "127.0.0.1:8000."
Every browser has a large list of signed root certificates. Obviously, the default LabVIEW certificate that is generated by your development environment is not signed or known by anyone, so your bowser will probably alert you. If you click 'Continue,' you will see the default LabVIEW Web Server index page, which mens that everything is working.
Creating and Signing Your Own Certificate
If you want to have a certificate signed by someone, such as your IT department or VeriSign, you'll want to create a Certificate Signing Request. To do this, launch the Distributed System Manager again from the Tools Menu. Under 'NI_SSLConfiguration' select 1) 'OpenCSRs,' which is short for 'Open Certificate Signing Request,' and 2) click 'Create', 3) complete the signing request form 4) click 'submit.' The text that appears in the following dialog is what will need to be reviewed and signed by whatever authority you so choose.
Example code from the Example Code Exchange in the NI Community is licensed with the MIT license.
