Neither one nor Many

 
December 3 2013

As a free alternative for Charles proxy and/or Fiddler I developed wxHttpProxy in one (long) night! Unfortunately I had to spend the next day making it stable, and support https traffic as well img1

The mentioned alternatives are really great by the way, and have quite a few additional features, I just needed a simple http proxy that I could use in metalogmon, that's why I developed my own. It is opensource, find it on bitbucket.

The idea is to integrate this http proxy into metalogmon, so that you would be able to process your output through javascript. The reason that request/response are both first class citizens is that where I currently develop software I plan to use this proxy between all subsystems communication, and here multiple services communicate with eachother using REST calls.

I want to visualize the call sequences/hierarchy, like [A -> B -> C], [A <- B <- C]. And not group them together like: [A <> B], [B <> C].

Install binary (64 bit and ubuntu/debian based system only)

Install my key

wget -O - http://cppse.nl/apt/keyFile | sudo apt-key add -

Add my repo to apt's sources.list.

sudo sh -c "echo deb http://cppse.nl/apt/dists/stable/main/binary / >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

Install the package:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install wxhttpproxy

Usage

wxHttpProxy

Tip of the day, add a shortcut for starting the proxy (like WINKEY+2 or something)

Available shortcuts

  • alt+i - Toggle intercept mode (capture/display request/response, or be silent)
  • alt+c - Clear buffer(s)

Catch library

With Catch I developed a few helper classes in a test-driven way, it's a lightweight single-header c++ library for creating unit tests. Really liked working with it and look forward to using it in the future some more.

The apt repository

The shiny new apt repository was also really easy to setup, once you have made your packages, simply follow this wiki.

Other platforms

Should you wish to compile it for windows, it is wxWidgets 3.0.0 based and should already be cross-platform, just didn't test it yet. Use Dialogblocks to compile it (and also have it compile wxWidgets for you (as that's just convenient img1)).

C++ Comments (1)

Ray Burgemeestre

2013-12-04 00:40:31

You can try it out for example with: `chromium-browser --proxy-server="localhost:8888"`.

And the way I use it at work is putting this environmental variable in front of your apache start command: `http_proxy=http://localhost:8888 [usually something complicated that starts apache here]` (i.e. in `/etc/init.d/apache2`)


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Author:
Ray Burgemeestre
february 23th, 1984

Topics:
C++, Linux, Webdev

Other interests:
Music, Art, Zen