Running Your Own Universal Editor Service | Adobe Experience Manager (original) (raw)

Last update: Fri Apr 04 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

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Learn how you can run your own Universal Editor Service either for local development or as part of your own infrastructure.

Local Universal Editor Services are not required or supported for projects using AEM authoring with Edge Delivery Services.

Overview overview

The Universal Editor Service is what binds the Universal Editor and the backend system. To be able to develop locally for the Universal Editor, you must run a local copy of the Universal Editor Service. This is because:

Adobe’s official Universal Editor Service is hosted globally, and your local AEM instance would need to be exposed to the internet.
While developing with a local AEM SDK, Adobe’s Universal Editor Service can not be accessed from the internet.
If your AEM instance has IP restrictions and Adobe’s Universal Editor Service isn’t in a defined IP range, you can host it yourself.

Use Cases use-cases

Your own copy of the Universal Editor Service is useful if you wish to:

Develop locally on AEM for use with the Universal Editor.
Run your own Universal Editor Service as part of your own infrastructure, independent of Adobe’s Universal Editor Service.

Both use cases are supported. This document explains how to run AEM in HTTPS alongside a local copy of the Universal Editor Service.

If you wish to run your own Universal Editor Service as part of your own infrastructure, you would follow the same steps as the local development example.

Set Up AEM to Run on HTTPS aem-https

Within an outer frame secured with HTTPS, an unsecure HTTP frame cannot be loaded. The Universal Editor Service runs on HTTPS and therefore AEM or any other remote page must run also on HTTPS.

To do this, you need to set up AEM to run on HTTPS. For development purposes you can use self-signed certificate.

See this document on how to set up AEM running on HTTPS including a self-signed certificate you can use.

Install the Universal Editor Service install-ue-service

The Universal Editor Service is not an entire copy of the Universal Editor, but only a subset of its features to ensure that calls from your local AEM environment are not routed over the internet, but from a defined endpoint you control.

NodeJS version 20 is required to run a local copy of the Universal Editor Service.

The Universal Editor Service is available via Software Distribution. Please see the Software Distribution documentation for details on how to access it.

Save the universal-editor-service.cjs file from Software Distribution to your local development environment.

Create a Certificate to Run the Universal Editor Service with HTTPS ue-https

The Universal Editor Service also requires a certificate to run on HTTPS in your development environment.

Run the following command.

$ openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout key.pem -x509 -days 365 -out certificate.pem

The command generates a key.pem and a certificate.pem file. Save these files to the same path as your universal-editor-service.cjs file.

Setting up the Universal Editor Service Configuration setting-up-service

A number of environment variables must be set in NodeJS to run the Universal Editor Service locally.

On the same path as your universal-editor-service.cjs, key.pem and certificate.pem files, create an .env file with the following content.

UES_PORT=8000
UES_PRIVATE_KEY=./key.pem
UES_CERT=./certificate.pem
UES_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=false
UES_CORS_PRIVATE_NETWORK=true

These are the minimum values required for local development in our example.

If you are running Chrome version 130+, you must enable sending CORS headers for private network access using the UES_CORS_PRIVATE_NETWORK option.

The following table details these and additional values available.

Value

Optional

Default

Description

UES_PORT

Yes

8080

Port on which the server runs

UES_PRIVATE_KEY

Yes

None

Path to the private key for HTTPS server

UES_CERT

Yes

None

Path to the certification file for HTTPS server

UES_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED

Yes

true

Reject unauthorized TLS connections

UES_DISABLE_IMS_VALIDATION

Yes

false

Disable IMS validation

UES_ENDPOINT_MAPPING

Yes

Empty

Mapping of the endpoints for internal rewrites
Example: UES_ENDPOINT_MAPPING='[{"https://your-public-facing-author-domain.net": "http://10.0.0.1:4502"}]'
Result: Universal Editor Service will connect to http://10.0.0.1:4502 instead of the provided connection https://your-public-facing-author-domain.net

UES_LOG_LEVEL

Yes

info

Log level for the server, possible values are silly, trace, debug, verbose, info, log, warn, error, and fatal

UES_SPLUNK_HEC_URL

Yes

None

HEC URL to Splunk endpoint

UES_SPLUNK_TOKEN

Yes

None

Splunk token

UES_SPLUNK_INDEX

Yes

None

Index to write logs to

UES_SPLUNK_SOURCE

Yes

universal-editor-service

Name of the source in the splunk logs

UES_CORS_PRIVATE_NETWORK

Yes

false

Enable sending CORS headers to allow Private network. Required for users of Chrome version 130+

Prior to the 2024.08.13 release of the Universal Editor, the following variables were required in the .env file. These values will be supported until 1 October 2024 for backwards compatibility.

EXPRESS_PORT=8000
EXPRESS_PRIVATE_KEY=./key.pem
EXPRESS_CERT=./certificate.pem
NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0

Running the Universal Editor Service running-ue

To start the Universal Editor Service, execute the following command:

$ node ./universal-editor-service.cjs

It should output the following to your terminal:

Universal Editor Service listening on port 8000 as HTTPS Server

Ensure the service starts HTTPS Server not HTTP Server.

Using the Local Universal Editor Service Instead of the Global Service using-local-ue

The Universal Editor knows which Universal Editor Service to use to edit a page based on how the page is instrumented. This is done via meta tags in the page loaded in the Universal Editor.

For a page to be edited using your local Universal Editor Service, the following meta tag must be set:

<meta name="urn:adobe:aue:config:service" content="https://localhost:8000">

Once set, you should see every content update call go to https://localhost:8000 instead of the default Universal Editor Service.

Attempting to directly access https://localhost:8000 results in a 404 error. This is expected behavior.

To test accessing your local Universal Editor Service, use https://localhost:8000/corslib/LATEST. See the next section for details.

Editing a Page with the Local Universal Editor Service editing

With the Universal Editor Service running locally and your content page instrumented to use the local service, you can now start the editor.

Open your browser to https://localhost:8000/ping.
Direct your browser to accept your self-signed certificate.
Once the self-signed certificate is trusted, you can edit the page using your local Universal Editor Service.

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