The HTTP Inspector is used to examine HTTP requests and responses as they happen. It runs a local proxy service to intercepts HTTP traffic and display each transaction.
Transactions highlighted in the Transaction table are displayed in detail in the Request and Response panes below.
The HTTP Inspector runs a local proxy for intercepting HTTP traffic. Start the proxy by opening the HTTP Inspector (Tools|HTTP Inspector) and selecting the Start button on the Inspector toolbar.
Alternatively, set Komodo to start the HTTP Inspector proxy automatically at startup. Under Preferences|HTTP Inspector, select Run HTTP Inspector in the background when Komodo starts up. If you want to run the Inspector on a port other than 8080 (the default) specify it in the Listen on port field.
If you are working behind a web proxy (i.e. at your network
gateway) you can specify the hostname and port of the proxy for
the HTTP Inspector to forward connections through. Select
Enable proxy forwarding and enter the hostname
and port (e.g. host.example.org:18080
) of the proxy.
If no port is specified Komodo will attempt to use port 8080.
Once the HTTP Inspector is running, your browser must be
configured to connect to it. Set the browser's internet
connection settings to point to the HTTP proxy on
localhost:8080
(default). If you've set the
Inspector to use a different port, use the port specified above
in Preferences|HTTP Inspector.
If you are running the browser on a different machine, specify
the hostname of the system running Komodo.
Debugging HTTP connections may require you to switch back and forth from using the Inspector to making a direct connection to the internet. If this is the case you may find it useful to configure a separate browser for debugging HTTP, or use a browser plugin (e.g. SwitchProxy Tool for Firefox) that allows you to change your proxy configuration quickly.
Note: The HTTP Inspector does not unencrypt HTTPS (encrypted) sessions.
Once Komodo and your browser have been configured to debug HTTP sessions, load the page you are trying to analyze:
By default, the Transaction table shows the following columns:
Selecting Break on every Request or Break on every
Response
in the toolbar will stop on the
appropriate part of the next transaction. The request or response
can then be edited before being submitted. The current break
state of the transaction will appear in the
State column in the main Inspector window.
All fields, headers and data buffers in the Request and Response panes are editable in the relevant break state.
If the response is returned in a compressed format (i.e. the response headers contain a "gzip" content-encoding) the unzipped data will be displayed in the data buffer. If any modifications are made, the data will be re-compressed before being passed back to the browser.
When modifying request or response data, the content-length header will be automatically modified to match the length of data in the corresponding data buffer.
Rules perform specified actions when a certain HTTP request or response is detected. They can be created (New...), edited (Edit...), removed (Delete) and ordered (Move Up and Move Down). The order of the rules can be important as all matching rules are processed sequentially.
The following parameters can be set for each rule: