Troubleshooting HTTPS connections with mitmproxy
Programming Snapshot – mitmproxy
© Lead Image © sergwsq and robert hyrons, 123RF.com
Finding the data zipping back and forth between the browser and server is not only interesting for snooping spies, but also for debugging developers. Mike Schilli gets you started with mitmproxy and shows how to customize it using Python scripts.
If things just don't work when you are developing a web application, the question immediately arises as to what data the browser and web server are actually exchanging. Tools for snooping on the network such as Wireshark (as well as proxies that sit between the client and the server) leave both requests and responses untouched, while logging them for inspection.
mitmproxy, which stands for man in the middle (MITM) proxy, is the king of the hill in this category; it makes the impossible possible by logging encrypted HTTPS requests. But first, let's look at the simplest, unencrypted case, for which my aging website perlmeister.com that still uses plain old unencrypted HTTP is a great choice.
Figure 1 shows how the browser retrieves the requested page's HTML text, along with some images and JavaScript snippets from the server. The mitmproxy tool, which is available for download as binary from [1], sports a terminal user interface (UI), which displays a double arrow to the left of the current request, called Flow in mitmproxy parlance. When you press the Enter key, the detailed request data come up, as shown in Figure 2.
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