The Network tab for node

…and much more. netsleuth is a project that brings the Chrome DevTools’ Network tab to node.js – natively. Inspect all outgoing HTTP(S) requests from a node.js process with no code changes.

The project aims to be an all-in-one HTTP toolkit. netsleuth can:

• Inspect any outgoing requests from node process(es) running on your machine. No code changes, proxy configuration, or TLS certificate headaches necessary.
• Act as a proxy server, allowing you to inspect requests between anything.
  • As a reverse proxy, it forwards all incoming requests to a target server.
  • As a forward proxy, it handles all outgoing requests from a properly configured client to any server.
• Use a public gateway service to forward inspectable incoming requests from the public internet to your local development environment.
• Make HTTP requests from the command line using the req CLI (and optionally inspect them in the GUI).

netsleuth uses the powerful and well-known Chrome DevTools GUI that developers are already familiar with. It implements a daemon that speaks the DevTools wire protocol to light up the GUI with request data, and serves a lightly modified version of the DevTools that can be viewed in a normal browser tab.

Bringing this project into reality required an exceptionally deep understanding of many core internet technologies: HTTP, TLS, TCP, DNS, and node.js internals to name a few.

Full details, documentation, and more is available on the netsleuth website.