how to monitor the network on node.js similar to chrome/firefox developer tools?

Question

When developing client side javascript applications, the developer network panel is invaluable for debugging network issues:

How does a developer creating a NodeJS application monitor the network traffic from the nodejs application to a http/https server? For example how to debug the following network traffic?

var http = require('http'); var req = http.request ... req.write ... req.send() 

My code is making a call to a third party https server, so I am unable to use wireshark or similar packet sniffing tools.

For more information, the problem I am trying to investigate is here.

EDIT:

Here are similar questions asking how to do the same thing in other languages:

• PYTHON: How can I see the entire HTTP request that's being sent by my Python application?
• JAVA: How to enable logging for apache commons HttpClient on Android

Answer 1

Use external HTTP Debugging tool. Your options include:

• node-http-proxy as seen in How do I use node.js http-proxy for logging HTTP traffic in a computer?
• middlefiddle written in node.js (but abandoned for 3 years now) https://github.com/mdp/middlefiddle
• mitmproxy - a CLI tool http://mitmproxy.org
• fiddler http://www.telerik.com/fiddler
• and many more - https://www.google.pl/search?q=HTTP+debugger

You fire up one of those, tell them where to route the traffic, and point your application at that debugging proxy instead of the real server.

Answer 2

If you only need to see URLs of outgoing traffic and what caused it, You can use debugging-aid

npm i -D debugging-aid node --require debugging-aid/network app.js  

Resulting console output may look like this:

[aid] network, outgoing  to: http://example.com/  stack:     at Agent.createSocket (_http_agent.js:234:26)     at Agent.addRequest (_http_agent.js:193:10)     at new ClientRequest (_http_client.js:277:16)     at Object.request (http.js:44:10)     at Request.start (myapp-path/node_modules/request/request.js:751:32)     at Request.end (myapp-path/node_modules/request/request.js:1511:10) [aid] network, outgoing  to: http://example.com/  stack:     at Agent.createSocket (_http_agent.js:234:26)     at Agent.addRequest (_http_agent.js:193:10)     at new ClientRequest (_http_client.js:277:16)     at Object.request (http.js:44:10)     at get (myapp-path/node_modules/got/source/request-as-event-emitter.js:234:22)     at Immediate.<anonymous> (myapp-path/node_modules/got/source/request-as-event-emitter.js:305:10) 

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Disclaimer:

I'm the author of debugging-aid
This answer was written when debugging-aid was on version 0.2.1