Use cache in http proxy for debugging in webdevelopment

Serving specific requests from a mutable cache

You can record requests now in a new tab "Cache", and you can choose to use this cache per request. Any such request will be immediately returned from the cache (instead of being proxied).

The cool thing is that you can modify the cache, so modifying CSS / Javascript is easy for example. I wanted this feature so I can debug some stuff on environments other than development. There are other ways to do this, but I think this is very convenient.

Some use cases

• Change <script src=... includes to URL's from production to your dev environment, to simply test javascript on production pages.
• Change javascript includes to their unminified / deobfuscated versions..
• Add 'debugger' / console.log's to the source.
• I've used it to more conveniently debug www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (an obfuscated javascript), by de-obfuscating it and using the step debugger in chrome.

By the way, a cool way to set a breakpoint in Javascript on specific function calls could be this. In ga.js there is a _gaq array, with a push function _gaq.push([something]);, I simply added this with wxhttpproxy in ga.js:

var foo = _gaq.push;
_gaq.push = function () {
    debugger;         <<<<<  and the debugger will intercept, you can view the stacktrace
    return foo.apply(_gaq, arguments);
}

Features / Roadmap

Note that the wxhttpproxy will intelligently modify the Content-Length header in case you modify the content. Content-Encodings gzip/deflate are not yet supported, for the time-being the proxy will garble the Accept header (by replacing gzip -> nogz, and deflate -> noflate). This is a workaround, that makes sure gzip/deflate isn't used.

Supported for chunked encoding should be added (easy), you can already edit it manually, just remove the chunked header, the hex numbers and add a Content-Length to work around it.

Real support for gzip / deflat should be added. I already have code for gzip / deflate support laying around somewhere.

Download

As an Ubuntu/debian package available here.

• It uses wx2.8. In wx3.0 the event model has changed a bit, and I believe there is an error in the event handling w/regards to sockets. I will post some more details on this later, and if I have the time see if I can fix it..