Unreal Engine Plugin: SimpleWebServer

About

With this plugin you can enable a web server inside of your Unreal Engine project. Your C++ or Blueprint will be notified when a user sends HTTP GET or POST requests to your project. You can submit data from outside with HTTP requests and let you project process it.

This plugin only accepts HTTP requests and does not send anything back. One-way channel to feed data to your project. However, it can probably be modified to reply with your own response.

The current plugin version is for Windows. But you can contribute with Linux or Mac plugin libraries. There is the step-by-step video of the plugin creation with Microsoft Visual Studio, please use it as a guide.

Features

• Basic web server with HTTP/1.1
• Accepts GET and POST requests
• UE components to receive data sent to the web server
• Your Actor receives data sent to the web server

Setup

Provided your UE project name is MyProject

• Download the latest release of the Plugin and unzip it
• Copy/Paste SimpleWebServer plugin to your Plugins directory
• Add "SimpleWebServer" to MyProject.Build.cs
• Start the UE and create an Actor, then add SimpleWebServer to its components
• This component will throw OnWebServerContentReceived event, which you need to bind to (C++ and Blueprint examples follow)

C++ example

AMyActor::AMyActor()
{
  WebServerComponent = CreateDefaultSubobject<USimpleWebServerComponent>(TEXT("WebServer"));
  WebServerComponent->OnWebServerContentReceived.AddDynamic(this, &AReceiveEventActor::OnContentReceived);
}

void AMyActor::OnContentReceived(FString& Content)
{
  UE_LOG(LogTemp, Warning, TEXT("CONTENT: %s"), *Content);
}

Blueprint example

Try it

• Drag your Actor to the scene and hit Play
• Post something to port 8080

curl -d "Say Hello!" -X POST http://localhost:8080

Building from source on Windows

• Clone the repository and cd SimpleWebServer-Plugin
• Open VS project by clicking on vs-project\SimpleWebServer\SimpleWebServer.sln
• Build solution for Release x64, this will create the following 2 files in vs-project\SimpleWebServer\x64\Release
  • SimpleWebServer.dll
  • SimpleWebServer.lib
• Copy those files to ue-project\MyProject\Plugins\SimpleWebServer\Source\ThirdParty\SimpleWebServerLibrary\Win64
• Also copy DLL file to ue-project\MyProject\Plugins\SimpleWebServer\Binaries\Win64
• And copy sws.h Header file to ue-project\MyProject\Plugins\SimpleWebServer\Source\ThirdParty\SimpleWebServerLibrary\include

copy vs-project\SimpleWebServer\SimpleWebServer\sws.h ue-project\MyProject\Plugins\SimpleWebServer\Source\ThirdParty\SimpleWebServerLibrary\include
copy vs-project\SimpleWebServer\x64\Release\*.dll ue-project\MyProject\Plugins\SimpleWebServer\Source\ThirdParty\SimpleWebServerLibrary\Win64
copy vs-project\SimpleWebServer\x64\Release\*.lib ue-project\MyProject\Plugins\SimpleWebServer\Source\ThirdParty\SimpleWebServerLibrary\Win64
copy vs-project\SimpleWebServer\x64\Release\*.dll ue-project\MyProject\Plugins\SimpleWebServer\Binaries\Win64

• Right click on ue-project\MyProject\MyProject.uproject and choose Generate Visual Studio project files, this will create MyProject.sln

• This should be enough to load the project in UE, double click on ue-project\MyProject\MyProject.uproject and choose Yes to build the project, it will take few minutes, be patient.

• Alternatively, or if the build fails for some reason, open the solution ue-project\MyProject\MyProject.sln and rebuild from IDE.

Resources

• Simple-Web-Server repository of the C++ project this plugin is built on.
• Step-by-step video guide of building this plugin, see Chapter 8 for C++ and Blueprint setup.

License

This code is open source software licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.