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Launch HN: Requestly (YC W22) – Network debugging proxy for web and mobile

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Re: Launch HN: Requestly (YC W22) – Network debugging proxy for web and mobile

#21

Post by sachinjain »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #17
sachinjain wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@jwong_ We are about to do a public release of Android SDK. Here are a couple of things which we did for internal purpose only (& WIP) but still sharing to give you an idea https://youtu.be/gs02m2pZJlQ (Demo Video) https://requestly.io/android-interceptor/ (WIP - Landing Page) I'd be really happy to discuss further on this approach. I believe this is going to make things really easy for developers.

Why would I use requestly for Android when perfectly good alternatives already exist ? Flipper ( https://fbflipper.com/ ) lets me do all of this (viewing, mocks, etc), with the same setup. And it's extensible too. HTTP Toolkit offers the proxying solution to it. Is there anything that might be different ?

Thank you for asking this and This is a very good question. The way we are building Requestly is to be used within teams, test different case-cases, have them on cloud and use them again & again without setting up everything from scratch. Collaboration is an essential feature which is missing in this space. To give you an example - A developer working in E-Commerce domain has mocked an API to return empty slots for a cart, (s)he'd like to share it with the team so that anyone in the team can use the same configuration while making any changes in those files. Now, Think of a Repository of Rules available in your company when you have to test different scenarios. When you work on a particular component, you can just enable different configurations and test them out easily without having to know how to set those configurations up. I believe this really improves onboarding and efficiency in testing your code.

Re: Launch HN: Requestly (YC W22) – Network debugging proxy for web and mobile

#22

Post by invalidname »

Sytten wrote: post #20

Congratulation! We are big fans of Requestly at Caido as we are building something somewhat similar for the infosec community ( https://caido.io ). Requestly feels good and there is a lot of potential for production debugging. I particularly like the switching of API endpoint so you can use the live prod website with a local API, super useful to debug.

If your interest extends to debugging production backends you can also check out Lightrun ( https://lightrun.com ) which continues this all the way through.

Re: Launch HN: Requestly (YC W22) – Network debugging proxy for web and mobile

#23

Post by tomashubelbauer »

Could you compare Requestly with Proxyman in terms of mobile debugging capabilities? Proxyman has especially well developed flow for installing certificates that allow the proxying without having to change the app's source code. I have not see other apps match that and it is incredibly helpful for only semi-technical QA workers who might not always have a dev team willing to integrate random SDKs only to make their life easier. The only problem with Proxyman is that randomly, its local proxy server may stop being reachable from the phone on the same network. I don't know why this happens.

Re: Launch HN: Requestly (YC W22) – Network debugging proxy for web and mobile

#24

Post by cyral »

I've been using the Browser extension for years and it is incredibly helpful. We use it to debug scripts on customer websites by making them resolve to our local instance so that we can test fixes quickly.

I would recommend some sort of graphic on the homepage to explain what Requestly does though, as you mention it can be confused with Postman when it's entirely different. Maybe an animated flowchart type graphic showing how a browser request to X is redirected to Y based on some Requestly rule.

Re: Launch HN: Requestly (YC W22) – Network debugging proxy for web and mobile

#25

Post by jwong_ »

sachinjain wrote: post #6
jwong_ wrote: post #4

I don't see any obvious links to mobile debugging in the features list or the FAQ. I see you mention an SDK here in the comment, but is there any links to docs on this? I frequently use Charles/Fiddler, but always interested in new offerings. Congrats on the release!

@jwong_ We are about to do a public release of Android SDK. Here are a couple of things which we did for internal purpose only (& WIP) but still sharing to give you an idea https://youtu.be/gs02m2pZJlQ (Demo Video) https://requestly.io/android-interceptor/ (WIP - Landing Page) I'd be really happy to discuss further on this approach. I believe this is going to make things really easy for developers.

Thanks for the links!

Curious on the body -- you showed some JSON requests, but do image resources or other larger responses also get proxied and viewable from browser?

For example, sometimes I like to view large minified JS blobs or images. Would that be viewable in the browser?

Also, what do the production vs debugging logs look like? Do you just run a special debugging build or is that a flag triggered within preferences? So e.g., would a user be able to turn debugging on to give extra logs to support staffs?

Re: Launch HN: Requestly (YC W22) – Network debugging proxy for web and mobile

#26

Post by sachinjain »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #23

Could you compare Requestly with Proxyman in terms of mobile debugging capabilities? Proxyman has especially well developed flow for installing certificates that allow the proxying without having to change the app's source code. I have not see other apps match that and it is incredibly helpful for only semi-technical QA workers who might not always have a dev team willing to integrate random SDKs only to make their l…

We also have a desktop app which works very similarly in terms of setting up proxy and installing the certificates. The fundamentals with which we are building Requestly makes it different from other tools in this space. We intend Requestly to be used by team, easy re-use of the mocking configurations. The intent to go with SDK based approach is that it is one-time setup while using an external proxy will always require you to configure your phone every time which is painful. Like you said, local proxy servers can be flaky sometimes and you may eventually end up spending more time on the tool rather than your actual work.

Re: Launch HN: Requestly (YC W22) – Network debugging proxy for web and mobile

#28

Post by sachinjain »

cyral wrote: post #24

I've been using the Browser extension for years and it is incredibly helpful. We use it to debug scripts on customer websites by making them resolve to our local instance so that we can test fixes quickly. I would recommend some sort of graphic on the homepage to explain what Requestly does though, as you mention it can be confused with Postman when it's entirely different. Maybe an animated flowchart type graphic sh…

So glad to hear this. This is really good feedback. Noted this down. We will soon make this live. We already have an animated gif at https://requestly.io/feature/redirect-url/

Do you mean to say we should have an animated flowchart for the hero image on the page?

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