Tools For Checking HTTP Requests and Responses From a Server

Abhishek Ghosh

By Abhishek Ghosh August 13, 2014 5:37 pm Updated on October 17, 2014

Tools For Checking HTTP Requests and Responses From a Server

Tools for checking HTTP requests and responses from a server are required for your web server™s response to a particular request. Here is an updated article. This is an updated article which was published 4 years ago on this website, it got deleted due to corrupted database as we needed to move and change the whole setup for SSL. Practically these kind of articles are evergreen and time standing. As there are lot of new things has arrived in this 4 years, it became more relevant to the readers.

Some Things You Need To Know Before Reading About The Tools For Checking HTTP Requests and Responses From a Server

Most importantly, we need to know about the HTTP Error Codes. Common response codes are known, but less known error codes force us to check some reference. 500 Internal Server Error is quite common for WordPress; obviously a WordPress user will know the name. But, Error 503 thrown by HTTP accelerator Varnish is less known – it is called Guru Meditation Error. Today, there are many tools; including the free tools which can be installed on our own server, like Rackspace Cloud Monitoring Tool.

Previously Mentioned Tools For Checking HTTP Requests and Responses From a Server

As we have said, this is an article which was published before, we only mentioned few tools on that post. We are citing them as for historical and real working purposes.

We mentioned Firebug, Firebug must be listed among the free tools for checking HTTP requests and responses from a server. From the network monitor in Firebug you can see all the requests made by loading the current page, the total time and total size of all elements on your back and the headers sent and received, status codes and time response to each request.

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YSlow and FireCookie were available as Addons in Firefox. If you are using Firebug and other FF Addons as tools for checking HTTP requests, it is recommended to use FireCookie and YSlow as additional tools.

Web-Sniffer: Very old and well known among the free tools for checking HTTP requests and responses from a server.

Rex Swain™s HTTP Viewer : Another mentionable tool among the tools for checking HTTP requests.

Check HTTP Header : Like other tools for checking HTTP requests, it serves the same purpose plus shows the meta descriptions.

With this list of tools for checking HTTP requests, you should be able to check the HTTP headers and status codes that your web server responds to a particular request. This ends the old article.

Newly Added Tools For Checking HTTP Requests and Responses From a Server

There is Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4 for Windows; HTTP Debugger 6.4 is an advanced tool. Pingdom has been a king for free monitoring. Apple OS X has Network Utility tool. From command line, we can simply use GNU wget or cURL :

 ## example with cURL
curl --dump-header - "$@"
 # example to see a 301 header
curl --dump-header - "thecustomizewindows.com"
 # also we can do
curl -i "https://thecustomizewindows.com/"
 # you'll see 301 for http to https redirection
 ## example with wget
wget --save-headers -qO - "$@"
 # change $@ with desired name

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## example with cURL

curl --dump-header - "$@"

# example to see a 301 header

curl --dump-header - "thecustomizewindows.com"

# also we can do

curl -i "https://thecustomizewindows.com/"

# you'll see 301 for http to https redirection

## example with wget

wget --save-headers -qO - "$@"

# change $@ with desired name

There is a tool named wiretap. It can do better with cURL than native cURL :

http://httpkit.com/wiretap

1	http://httpkit.com/wiretap

Not to forget Wgetrc, a GNU package. Most funny is that, the original article at /2011/06/tools-for-checking-https-requests-and-responses-from-a-server/ gave us 404, which made us to republish it. So, the visitors will face 301 if they try https://thecustomizewindows.com/2011/06/tools-for-checking-https-requests-and-responses-from-a-server/

Tagged With http request and response saver , tools to let you see requests on server

About Abhishek Ghosh

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