HTTP communication monitoring on OS X

Question

What application do you use to monitor HTTP communication on OS X?

Answer 1

Charles Proxy

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Runs on JAVA. Available on OSX, Linux and Windows.

Answer 2

I like TcpCatcher. It is free and 100% java based so it works fine on Mac OS X. Not only, you will be able to monitor HTTP communication but you will also be able to change requests / responses on the fly which opens very interesting possibilities.. There is a dedicated tutorial on capturing iPhone's HTTP communication.

Answer 3

If you're looking to trace application traffic, Wireshark is the best tool I've found - it can log and decode HTTP and many other protocols, and the GUI's search tools make finding the messages you're interesting in pretty quick and painless.

Other reasons I recommend this:

• It's quick to install
• It captures traffic straight from the network card, there is no need to change the application or set up proxies etc. It'll even read dumps captured from tcpdump and similar tools offline
• It's multi-platform (works on Windows/Mac/Linux and others)
• It's open source

Answer 4

HTTPTracer

http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/HTTPTracer

Answer 5

You could also use dTrace to monitor in even more detail, if that's what you need.