integrallis/httplog

httplog

Log outgoing HTTP requests made from your application. See the blog post for more details.

So far this gem works with the following ruby modules and libraries:

Net::HTTP
Ethon (Needs work to support latest versions)
Excon (for excon >= v18.0, httplog >= 0.2.4 is required)
OpenURI
Patron
HTTPClient
HTTParty
HTTP (Up to version 0.8.14; see known issues below)

These libraries are at least partially supported, where they use one of the above as adapters:

Faraday
Typhoeus (Needs work to support latest versions)

In theory, it should also work with any library built on top of these. But since the difference between theory and practice is bigger in practice than in theory, YMMV.

This is very much a development and debugging tool; it is not recommended to use this in a production environment.

Installation

gem install httplog

Usage

require 'httplog'

By default, this will log all outgoing HTTP requests and their responses to $stdout on DEBUG level.

Notes on content types

Binary data from response bodies (as indicated by the Content-Type header)is not logged.
Text data (text/* and most application/* types) is encoded as UTF-8, with invalid characters replaced. If you need to inspect raw non-UTF data exactly as sent over the wire, this tool is probably not for you.

Configuration

You can override the following default options:

HttpLog.options[:logger]        = Logger.new($stdout)
HttpLog.options[:severity]      = Logger::Severity::DEBUG
HttpLog.options[:log_connect]   = true
HttpLog.options[:log_request]   = true
HttpLog.options[:log_headers]   = false
HttpLog.options[:log_data]      = true
HttpLog.options[:log_status]    = true
HttpLog.options[:log_response]  = true
HttpLog.options[:log_benchmark] = true
HttpLog.options[:compact_log]   = false # setting this to true will make 
all "log_*" options redundant
HttpLog.options[:color]         = false # (see below)
# only log requests made to specified hosts (URLs)
HttpLog.options[:url_whitelist_pattern] = /.*/
# overrides whitelist
HttpLog.options[:url_blacklist_pattern] = nil

So if you want to use this in a Rails app:

# config/initializers/httplog.rb
HttpLog.options[:logger] = Rails.logger

You can colorize the output to make it stand out in your logfile:

HttpLog.options[:color] = {color: :black, background: :light_red}

For more color options see colorize documentation

Example

With the default configuration, the log output might look like this:

D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.532970 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Connecting: localhost:80
D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.533877 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Sending: GET http://localhost:9292/index.html
D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.534499 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Status: 200
D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.534544 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Benchmark: 0.00057 seconds
D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.534578 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Response:
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Test Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>This is the test page.</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Known Issues

The httprb/http gem made some breaking changes in v0.9.0 that I haven't had time to fix yet. Pull requests welcome, but they should be backwards compatible to <= 0.8.14.
Requests types other than GET and POST have not been explicitly tested. They may or may not be logged, depending on the implementation details of the underlying library. If they are not for a particular library, please feel free to open an issue with the details.

When using OpenURI, the reading of the HTTP response body is deferred, so it is not available for logging. This will be noted in the logging statement:

  D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.547005 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Connecting: localhost:80
  D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.547938 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Sending: GET http://localhost:9292/index.html
  D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.548615 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Status: 200
  D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.548662 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Benchmark: 0.000617 seconds
  D, [2012-11-21T15:09:03.548695 #6857] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Response: (not available yet)

When using HTTPClient, the TCP connection establishment will be logged after the HTTP request and headers, due to the way HTTPClient is organized.

 D, [2012-11-22T18:39:46.031698 #12800] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Sending: GET http://localhost:9292/index.html
 D, [2012-11-22T18:39:46.031756 #12800] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Header: accept: */*
 D, [2012-11-22T18:39:46.031788 #12800] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Header: foo: bar
 D, [2012-11-22T18:39:46.031942 #12800] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Connecting: localhost:9292
 D, [2012-11-22T18:39:46.033409 #12800] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Status: 200
 D, [2012-11-22T18:39:46.033483 #12800] DEBUG -- : [httplog] Benchmark: 0.001562 seconds

Also when using HTTPClient, make sure you include httplog after httpclient in your Gemfile.
When using Ethon or Patron, and any library based on them (such as Typhoeus), the TCP connection is not logged (since it's established by libcurl).
Benchmarking only covers the time between starting the HTTP request and receiving the response. It does not cover the time it takes to establish the TCP connection.

Running the specs

Make sure you have the necessary dependencies installed by running bundle install. Then simply run bundle exec rspec spec. This will launch a simple rack server on port 9292 and run all tests locally against that server.

Contributing

If you have any issues with httplog, or feature requests, please add an issue on GitHub or fork the project and send a pull request. Please include passing specs with all pull requests.

Contributors

Thanks to these fine folks for contributing pull requests:

integrallis / httplog