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Show HN: We’re open-sourcing Requestly - HTTP debugging proxy for Web and Mobile (github.com)

54 points by sachinjain ↗ HN
Hey HN! We’ve open-sourced Requestly (https://github.com/requestly/requestly) - A network debugging proxy for web & mobile apps. Requestly intercepts all HTTP(s) requests & responses and provides full control to developers to modify the request/response like rewriting request URL to hit different environment or returning different response for APIs/scripts.

In addition to HTTP(s) interception & modification capabilities, Requestly also offers Mock Server [0] & recording the browser sessions [1] with video, console logs, & network logs stitched together. We use rrweb[2] for this.

Requestly is available as browser extension [3] with 175K+ downloads on Chrome Store & as a desktop app [4] on all platforms. Browser extension is written in javascript (slowly migrating to typescript now) and use chrome APIs for interception & modification. Desktop app is written in JS (slowly moving to typescript here too) & use electron as underlying framework to support cross-platform needs. For mock server & collaboration features, we use Firebase as backend.

Here are some popular use cases how people use Requestly - Stress testing frontend code by testing bad API responses, API failovers, latencies, testing with huge API responses, etc. (You create different rules inside Requestly and enable/disable as per use case) - Testing scripts directly on customer sites - Switching environments for APIs & scripts - Developing features when APIs are not ready - Modifying live websites (prospects) and demo their product directly on client’s website instead of an internal website (Applicable for SaaS products that integrate with JS)

Overall, we’re quite new to the open source world and still learning how to run an open-source product & roadmap. We’d love the HN community to share their feedback on what we’re building and how can we improve. If there’s anything that they’d like us to build in the future, we’re all ears. Check us out at [requestly.io](http://requestly.io) and [github.com/requestly/requestly](http://github.com/requestly/requestly) to give us a shot

[0]: Mock Server - https://app.requestly.io/mocks

[1]: Sample Session - https://app.requestly.io/sessions/saved/iedsEivORxdLTcBiNcBA

[2]: https://github.com/rrweb-io/rrweb

[3]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-url-modif...

[4]: https://requestly.io/downloads

14 comments

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gautamp8
Thank you for open sourcing Requestly. Session recording sounds interesting for my usecase, can you share a bit about how does it work? Is it similar to LogRocket?
sachinjain
LogRocket integrates within in your product and captures the sessions for the end users.

We are primarily solving within team collaboration for faster debugging. For example - When QA/customer report share issues with developers, instead of sharing the screenshot/har files they can share sessions and developers can use the session recording to get complete picture of the issue and avoid follow up questions.

gautamp8
I believe you must be saving the sessions in your cloud, is it possible to download the sessions locally?
sachinjain
We don't have it right now. Couple of users have also asked about it in the past. Opened an Issue for this - https://github.com/requestly/requestly/issues/356 Looks like we need to prioritize this soon.

Out of curiosity do you need ability to support sessions locally for privacy reasons?

SankhaChak
Great to see Requestly come up as Open Source Browser Devtool. It's great to see it being made available to the community, and I'm excited to see the amazing contributions that will come from it. Looking forward to be a small part of that!
sachinjain
This is awesome to hear and we really look forward to contributions.
webdev_2
My team cannot live without Requestly. Love to see it been open sourced. Looking forward to contribute.
vishnumohandas
Hey Sachin, congratulations for open-sourcing Requestly, big step!

Another YC company that launched on HN yesterday[1] has also opted for a similar license, so I'm guessing this is a template of sorts. It would be great if you could share why you chose this over AGPL.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34955699

wrongsahil
Hey @vishnumohandas. I'm Sahil, Co-Founder at Requestly. Like you said, this is pretty much a standard template called open-core model for open source companies now a days. We explored lots of open source companies to finalise on AGPL+EE. We selected this because we wanted people to use it freely without any limitations and keeping only certain features like Team Collaboration under Proprietary license so that we could make a sustainable business as well.

We took inspiration from other awesome opensource companies like Gitlab, cal, Bitwarden before choosing the license. Hope this helps!

pawan89
Thanks for doing this. It will be really helpful, I was looking forward to do some custom modification in the mocks server.
shubham805
Looks very interesting! Any plans for supporting this for backend?
sachinjain
We're not focussing on backend too much as of now. We do want to cover mobile & backend at some point in future. However, we recently got a feature request to support Intercepting & Modifying network requests from locally running NodeJS instance [0] so we made it possible.

[0]: https://docs.requestly.io/debug-backend/nodejs

yashbindal
Congratulations on open-sourcing Requestly, Amazing stuff!!