New Fedora and EPEL package: httpry

A fellow Racker showed me httpry about five years ago and I’ve had in my toolbox as a handy way to watch HTTP traffic. I’d used some crazy tcpdump arguments and some bash one-liners to pull out the information I needed but I never could get the live look that I really wanted.

Here’s an example of what httpry’s output looks like on a busy site like icanhazip.com:

 GET	icanhazip.com	/	HTTP/1.1	-	-
2012-03-13 23:29:39 192.x.x.x	186.x.x.x < -	-	-	HTTP/1.1	200	OK
2012-03-13 23:29:39 187.x.x.x	192.x.x.x > GET	icanhazip.com	/	HTTP/1.0	-	-
2012-03-13 23:29:39 192.x.x.x	187.x.x.x < -	-	-	HTTP/1.0	200	OK
2012-03-13 23:29:39 188.x.x.x	192.x.x.x > GET	icanhazip.com	/	HTTP/1.1	-	-
2012-03-13 23:29:39 192.x.x.x	188.x.x.x < -	-	-	HTTP/1.1	200	OK
2012-03-13 23:29:39 189.x.x.x	192.x.x.x > GET	icanhazip.com	/	HTTP/1.1	-	-
2012-03-13 23:29:39 192.x.x.x	189.x.x.x < -	-	-	HTTP/1.1	200	OK

You can watch the requests come in and the responses go out in real time. It even allows for BPF-style packet filters which allow you to narrow down the source and/or destination IP addresses and ports you want to watch. You can run it as a foreground process or as a daemon depending on your needs.

It’s now available as a RPM package for Fedora 15, 16, 17 (and rawhide) as well as EPEL 6 (for RHEL/CentOS/SL 6).