Current WebDebug version: 1.0
Installation
- First, install a version of Python for your system.
You can find the right version at the official
Python site. WebDebug has been developed and
tested with Python version 1.5.1 (the current release) but may work with other
versions too
- Second, download WebDebug and decompress it in a directory
of your choice
Running WebDebug
WebDebug is easy to run, just execute
webdebug.py
at a command prompt.
By default WebDebug will listen for HTTP requests from your browser on port 2001,
if you give it another port as argument, WebDebug will use that instead:
webdebug -port [port]
Browser Configuration
All you need to do is set your browser's HTTP proxy server to point to the WebDebug
server. If you are using the standard WebDebug settings, you can set your proxy server
host to localhost and the port to 2001. If you already use a proxy server to access
the web then, sorry, WebDebug won't work for you. If this is a pain and you'd really
like WebDebug to be able to work with existing proxy-servers,
let me know.
Surfing
Nothing new here, just surf away. Every request the browser makes shows up in the window
WebDebug was run from. This way you can verify that things are working as expected.
Viewing HTTP messages
To access WebDebug's menu, just make the following request from a browser:
http://webdebug_host:webdebug_port/WEBDEBUG/
if you have used the default value and are running WebDebug on your local machine,
you will typically hit:
http://localhost:2001/WEBDEBUG/
The
/WEBDEBUG/
portion of the URL tells WebDebug that
the URL is a command for it instead of a standard browser request.
You will then see the WebDebug menu containing the following options:
- Show Message List: the message list keeps track of all request/response pairs that
WebDebug processes. This command tells WebDebug to display them
- Clear Message List: removes all request/response pairs from the message list
- Load Message List: loads a message list from file. This replaces the existing message list
- Save Message List: saves the current message list to file
Notes: all loads and saves are relative to the directory you started WebDebug from.
Also, the format WebDebug uses should be completely cross-platform. You can save a message
list on Windows NT and send to a friend using WebDebug on Solaris.
The Message List
When you display the contents of the message list, the following information is displayed:
- Request and associated response contents: for differentiation purposes, all rows
received from a browser or a server are either completely greyed out or have their
first column greyed out
- Additional information is also returned, some of which depends of the exact nature
of the request or response:
- Size of message: including headers, body, etc.
- Message received: time at which the request was received from the browser or
at which the response was received from the server
- Browser/Server IP address: pretty obvious
- Parameters: if a request has parameters in the URL and/or in the body of a
message (as with a POST), the name-value pairs are URL decoded and presented
here
- Image: if a response contains an image, it will be displayed
- Display HTML instructions: if a response contains HTML, this link will display
it in another browser window
- Display HTTP response: returns the response to a new browser window
- Decoded authorization: if the request includes a username/password authorization
it is decoded here
- Requests and their corresponding responses are displayed in the order the pair was
added to the message list
- Also displayed are the total number of requests, responses, their total size, etc. and
a table containing statistics of each content-type contained in the message list