Tweaking BrowserMob-Proxy
If you're writing tests for your web-based applications (and if you're not, I'm sure Chris Hartjes will want a stern word with you a€¦), then you might be using a combination of Selenium 2 / aka Selenium WebDriver and WebMetrics' BrowserMob-Proxy for your testing.
WebDriver is the latest Selenium API for controlling real web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, and BrowserMob-Proxy adds in essential missing capabilities such as checking HTTP status codes and injecting headers for HTTP Basic Auth.
I've recently forked BrowserMob-Proxy on GitHub and started to make tweaks to it for work. Thought I'd mention it, in case anyone else out there is using BrowserMob-Proxy and would find our tweaks useful too. We'll be submitting our tweaks upstream in due course.
- Executable JAR - Maven POM file updated to build browsermob-proxy-X.XX-standalone.jar - an executable JAR file - during the a€˜package' phase. Very handy if you're running and testing it via the remote API. Upstream's browsermob-proxy-X.XX-bin.zip is still available, and is now always built during the a€˜install' phase.
- /features endpoint - a new REST API endpoint allowing you to GET and POST and DELETE feature flag settings. We're using this to enable/disable any new features that might break backwards compatibility, in case you want to use existing BrowserMob-Proxy REST clients with our tweaked version. Said REST clients can also use this to see which features are present / enabled.
- enhancedReplies - by default, BrowserMob-Proxy isn't the most chatty of REST services. Switch this feature on (POST a€˜enhancedReplies=true' to /config/enhancedReplies), and now every response includes either a a€˜success: TRUE' or an a€˜error: TRUE' field for your client to easily understand what has happened.
- More logging - we've added some additional log messages throughout the ProxyResource REST API, to make it easier to debug browsermob-proxy REST API clients. This logging is off by default, and is switched on by POSTing a€˜paramLogs=true' to /config/paramLogs, and/or POSTING a€˜actionLogs=true' to /config/actionLogs.
- additional header GET / DELETE API - we've extended the REST API for additional HTTP request headers to now allow you to GET /proxy/:port/header/:name and to DELETE /proxy/:port/header/:name if you need to. You can also delete all additional HTTP request headers in one go by DELETE /proxy/:port/headers.
- REST API for HTTP Basic Auth - BrowserMob-Proxy's existing support for HTTP Basic Auth is now available via PUT /proxy/:port/basicAuth/:domain. One of the key features missing from WebDriver. (This is a convenience feature; it could be done by injecting the headers directly into BrowserMob-Proxy).
- exception handling - by default, BrowserMob-Proxy lets exceptions bubble up to the servlet container a€¦ which unfortunately sends back html errors rather than a JSON error. To make things a little easier for REST clients, I've tweaked the REST API to trap exceptions and return back a (hopefully suitable) error class. This will probably need more tweaking before it provides useful information all the time.
Bookmark this page; I'll be updating it as we complete more tweaks to BrowserMob-Proxy.