I really like vrcpy. I used it a lot with pytest in my previous job. httpdbg isn’t exactly the same; the idea is more about seeing HTTP requests in real-time and being able to easily study them.
Unlike other tools such as proxies that allow you to trace HTTP requests, httpdbg makes it possible to link the HTTP request to the Python code that initiated it. This is why it is specific to Python and does not work with other languages.
If you're coding something up, why wouldn't you know that piece of code does a HTTP/s request? Based on what you said, it sounds like a scenario where a programmer doesn't know how a request was made. Are there examples of scenarios where that's the case?
Sounds like a bit of a security nightmare where there's code doing arbitrary requests.
Maybe you are working with an application or library that you didn't write, and want to see the raw requests and responses it generates without reading the entirety of the source code.
Maybe you are generating HTTP requests through an API and need to see which headers it sets by default, or which headers are or are not getting set due to a misconfiguration or bug.
There are probably loads more use cases, and if I actually did programming for a living, I could probably list a lot more.
Here's a concrete scenario for you:
Say you are in a team of 10 developers with a huge codebase that has accumulated over 5+ years. If you're new in the team, and you need to understand when a specific HTTP header is sent, or just snoop the value in the payload you otherwise wouldn't be able to see.
> If you're coding something up, why wouldn't you know that piece of code does a HTTP/s request?
Because tracing all side-effects in a huge codebase with a lot of libraries and layers can be a daunting task.
Update: if you haven't worked with 20 year old >1m LOC codebase which went through many different teams and doesn't have any documentation whatsoever, you may lack necessary perspective to see value tools like this.
I think you attract downvotes because tools are helpful. If you have a huge unknown codebase, it can be nice to attack it from different angles. Reading code is useful, but observing what it does in runtime can be useful, too. Also, with hairier code, it can be more useful to first observe and prod it like a black box.
It works only with Python code because it intercepts HTTP requests by hooking into certain Python functions.
It supports any HTTP library based on Python’s standard socket library. Specifically, it works with libraries like requests, httpx, aiohttp, and urllib3, as well as pytest, providing more detailed information about the initiator of the requests.
