188816 - No http/https session logging

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 27119

(Core :: Networking: Cookies, enhancement)

Description

[Jeff Prothero]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.20 i686; Nav)
Build Identifier: 

One needs to be able to generate a complete log of all http/https traffic
(both directions) during a browser session.  This sort of basic low-level
logging capability is critical to resolving a wide variety of diagnostic
debugging and development issues -- that is why it is routine in all servers
and most mature clients.  It is (imho) missing from Mozilla only due to relative
immaturity of the www platform.

In particular, when doing www automation tasks (e.g., using curl), it is
critically important to be able to generate a known-good sample log on which
to base one's scripting.  For http, this can be done clumsily using tcpdump,
but that is hardly ideal.  For https (which is increasingly important), there
is currently no decent way to do this at all.  (ssldump's restrictions make it
just about useless in practice.)  I am currently reduced to compiling a
custom-hacked version of Konqueror to provide this capability.  (I am not a
fan of Konqeror -- this is the only time I use it -- but it turns out to be
easier to hack this into Konqueror than Mozilla on a quick-and-dirty basis,
for someone who is, like me, unfamiliar with browser codebases.)

(It would of course be even better if one could accomplish web automation
from within a full-power browser such as Mozilla rather than having to use
little **** kludges like curl, but I think it will clearly be a decade
or more before the Mozilla team is ready to even think about doing a good job
of making the client fully scriptable.)

Anyhow -- kudos for all the good work!  Cleaning up after the "Worse is Better"
coding crowd is a thankless, unpleasant job.  (Speaking as someone who has
cleaned up far too much academic Fortran and such.)

Ad astra! :)
  -- Cynbe


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
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Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Set these environment variables before running mozilla :

NSPR_LOG_MODULES=nsHttp:2
NSPR_LOG_FILE=c:\http.log

and you will get a stream of request/response headers dumped in c:\http.log.

I could be prettier though, because it's logging on a very low level, normally
only used to debug netwroling problems.

Ps : in my company we use logging on a pass-through Squid proxy-server (no
caching), installed as a transparent proxy. Only then you can be sure that you
catch all the traffic.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 27119 ***