User Authentication and Session Management

To start the command line interface, log in to the server with the following command from a command prompt:

iem LOGIN

Three arguments are required, SERVER, USER, and PASSWORD. Provide these arguments in one of the following three ways:

Environment variables

Use IEM_SERVER, IEM_USER, and IEM_PASSWORD to specify the values of the arguments.

Command line

Use --server, --user, and --password to specify the variables on the command line.

Standard Input

If any arguments are not provided by either of the first two methods, the CLI utility prompts you to provide them.

If the server uses a self-signed certificate for HTTPS interactions, the utility prompts you to accept or decline the certificate. If you choose to trust it, the certificate is cached and used to validate all future interactions with the server.

The --masthead command line argument can be used to specify a local file to trust when communicating with the server, removing the need for this prompt. The masthead file is copied into the CLI cache directory and used for all future interactions with the server.

When login is successful, the utility receives a session token from the server, which it saves to a local config file and uses for future communication. This token is currently invalidated after 5 minutes of inactivity by the server. You can configure this time with the setting _BESDataServer_APIAuthenticationTimeoutMinutes.