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Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

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Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#11

Post by erdii »

yoavm wrote: post #4

The "How it was made" section of the README was not less interesting than the tool itself: > The way we have set things up is that we live and practice together on a bit over a hundred acres of land. In the mornings and evenings we chant and meditate together, and for about one week out of every month we run and participate in a meditation retreat. The rest of the time we work together on everything from caring for t…

To be honest: This sounds like just another of the many many other yoga/spiritual cults that currently exist all over the western world.

EDIT: typos and slight wording changes

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#12

Post by abracadaniel »

alexflint wrote: post #10
tacone wrote: post #6

Whoa, great! Questions: - What's the performance impact? - Does it allow payload/headers inspection?

Thanks! Haven't measured performance at all. However when I decided on the approach I looked at the performance benchmarks from tun2socks, which uses the same gVisor code that httptap uses, and it seems that pretty great performance is possible with that code. Still need to do the work of actually achieving comparable performance. Payloads and headers can be dumped with --body and --header respectively. There is an e…

I see it supports .har, but .warc support would be amazing. It's the iso standard for web archives, which would give you the ability to replay archived websites via multiple tools.

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#13

Post by beachy »

yoavm wrote: post #4

The "How it was made" section of the README was not less interesting than the tool itself: > The way we have set things up is that we live and practice together on a bit over a hundred acres of land. In the mornings and evenings we chant and meditate together, and for about one week out of every month we run and participate in a meditation retreat. The rest of the time we work together on everything from caring for t…

Reminds me of a quote from "Soul of a new machine":

> During one period, when the microcode and logic were glitching at the nanosecond level, one of the overworked engineers departed the company, leaving behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation: "I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#14

Post by alexflint »

sevg wrote: post #5

This looks great! The GitHub profile points to https://www.monasticacademy.org/about which I have no particular opinion on but it did leave me wondering what the connection is between their monastic training retreat and their projects on GitHub. Edit: Oh, I didn’t go to the bottom of the readme https://github.com/monasticacademy/httptap?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Yeah, for other readers who are looking at this thread, the connection is just that this (httptap) is a Monastic Academy project, and what that means is that there is a group of people living on 123 acres in Vermont according to a fairly traditional Buddhist monastic structure (though we are not ordained monks), and during the day we work on a number of technology and non-technology projects together. The link to the readme that sevg posted above is a good overview:

https://github.com/monasticacademy/httptap?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#16

Post by alexflint »

gear54rus wrote: post #7
alexflint wrote: post #2

httptap is a process-scoped http tracer that you can run without root priveleges. You can run `httptap ` where is a linux program and you get a trace of http/https requests and responses in standard output: httptap -- python -c "import requests; requests.get('https://monasticacademy.org')" ---> GET https://monasticacademy.org/ GET https://www.monasticacademy.org/ It works by running in an isolated network namespace.…

can it modify requests or responses? with the current web getting increasingly user-hostile a need for tool like this was never more apparent especially if it doesn't require proxy configuration

Agreed! So there isn't any interface for modifying requests/responses at present, but it's definitely possible given the underlying approach. If you consider [this line of code](https://github.com/monasticacademy/httptap/blob/main/http.go...) where you have an HTTP request parsed from the that ran and are about to send it out to the public internet: you could modify the request (or the response that is received a few lines further) in just the way that you would modify a normal http.Request in Go.

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#17

Post by alexflint »

beachy wrote: post #13
yoavm wrote: post #4

The "How it was made" section of the README was not less interesting than the tool itself: > The way we have set things up is that we live and practice together on a bit over a hundred acres of land. In the mornings and evenings we chant and meditate together, and for about one week out of every month we run and participate in a meditation retreat. The rest of the time we work together on everything from caring for t…

Reminds me of a quote from "Soul of a new machine": > During one period, when the microcode and logic were glitching at the nanosecond level, one of the overworked engineers departed the company, leaving behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation: "I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

Wow that's an incredible quote! It feels like that to me too.

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#19

Post by quesera »

erdii wrote: post #11
yoavm wrote: post #4

The "How it was made" section of the README was not less interesting than the tool itself: > The way we have set things up is that we live and practice together on a bit over a hundred acres of land. In the mornings and evenings we chant and meditate together, and for about one week out of every month we run and participate in a meditation retreat. The rest of the time we work together on everything from caring for t…

To be honest: This sounds like just another of the many many other yoga/spiritual cults that currently exist all over the western world. EDIT: typos and slight wording changes

There is absolutely nothing in their README to suggest that you are using the word "cult" properly.

Re: Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program

#20

Post by adtac »

Using a TUN device for this is a really cool idea! And the "How it was made" section is one of the best things I've read in a Github README.

I'm building something called Subtrace [1] but it can intercept both incoming and outgoing requests automatically. Looks like we converged on the same interface for starting the program too lol [2]. Subtrace's purpose is kinda different from httptap's though (more observability / monitoring for cloud backend services, hence the emphasis on both incoming and outgoing). Also, it uses a different approach -- using Seccomp BPF to intercept the socket, connect, listen, accept, and ~10 other syscalls, all TCP connections get proxied through Subtrace. We then parse the HTTP requests out of the TCP stream and then show it to the user in the Chrome DevTools Network tab, which we repurposed to work in the browser like a regular webapp.

Any fun stories there from running programs under httptap? Who phones home the most?

[1] https://github.com/subtrace/subtrace

[2] https://docs.subtrace.dev/quickstart

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