Simple core command line tools like nc
, socat
seem not to be able to handle the specific HTTP stuff going on (chunks, transfer encodings, etc.). As a result this may produce unexpected behaviour compared to talking to a real web server. So, my first thought is to share the quickest way I know of setting up a tiny web server and making it just do what you want: dump all output.
The shortest I could come up with using Python Tornado:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web
import pprint
class MyDumpHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
def post(self):
pprint.pprint(self.request)
pprint.pprint(self.request.body)
if __name__ == "__main__":
tornado.web.Application([(r"/.*", MyDumpHandler),]).listen(8080)
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
Replace the pprint
line to output only the specific fields you need, for example self.request.body
or self.request.headers
. In the example above it listens on port 8080, on all interfaces.
Alternatives to this are plenty. web.py, Bottle, etc.
(I'm quite Python oriented, sorry)
If you don't like its way of outputting, just run it anyway and try tcpdump
like this:
tcpdump -i lo 'tcp[32:4] = 0x484f535420'
to see a real raw dump of all HTTP-POST requests. Alternatively, just run Wireshark.
netcat
(nc
on some systems) with the-l
(listen) and-p
(port number) options.nc
for partial testing - but I can see following disadvantages: 1) it does not send HTTP status code 2) I have to hit Ctrl+D after I see the request to close the connection 3) it does not know how to react upon then 'Expect: 100-continue' header 4) it does not know how to handle the 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked' header - it probably just displays the first (probably) empty chunk