How to view the raw request of HTTPoison

Question

I am trying to submit this form using HTTPoison

https://gist.github.com/shankardevy/6728d63eb528b3cb223a

with the below code:

HTTPoison.post!(url,{:multipart, [{"username", "user"}, {"password", "pass"}]})

However, the resulting page gives "invalid authentication". But when I try to login using the same credentials using browser, it works.

So I was wondering if I can see the raw http request by HTTPoison so that I can compare it with the raw request from browser.

Answer 1

If you just want to see the request, how about accessing http://httpbin.org? It echoes back the requested information.

iex(1)> IO.puts HTTPoison.post!("http://httpbin.org/post",{:multipart, [{"username", "user"}, {"password", "pass"}]}).body

HTTPoison uses hackney as backend, and I have file-uploading example using hackney in the following (Though it's somewhat different from your example, I'm posting it for your reference, as I previously struggled on finding examples about multipart).

https://github.com/parroty/excoveralls/blob/master/lib/excoveralls/poster.ex

Is there any special reason to use multipart for just sending user/password parameter by the way?

Answer 2

You can use the awesome ngrok tool to create a proxy for your requests, e.g.

$ ngrok example.com 8080

will spit out an URL like http://abcd1234.ngrok.com that proxies any requests sent to it to example.com port 8080. Then you can inspect the raw requests in ngrok's web monitoring UI, at http://localhost:4040. Needless to say, you will be sending all your data to a third party so do not submit any usernames and passwords you don't want to leak.