Tool to monitor HTTP traffic

Question

I have an application on my iPhone which sends out Http requests; is it possible to look into the HTTP stream using some tool??

I use standalone version of (IEInspector's) HttpAnalyzer tool on my windows PC to monitor HTTP traffic from all processes including the apps on Android phone (thanks to android debug bridge interface). Is there a similar tool for OS X that I can use for iPhone apps? Is this even allowed?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I use Charles for HTTP monitoring. It can hook into the standard OS X proxy settings (as used by Safari) so it should work fine with the iPhone emulator in the SDK.

Answer 2

To directly monitor the traffic you can use tools like Wireshark or tcpdump.

If you want to send 'fake' requests to a server or have a simple listening server running to receive requests from the iPhone you can use netcat and cURL. I've explained that case in a tutorial if that is sufficient for what you need. If not I recommend Wireshark, which has a GUI and is quite simple to understand.

Answer 3

You can use HTTP Catcher. It can monitor HTTP traffic without a computer and Wi-Fi.