how to monitor the network on node.js similar to chrome/firefox developer tools?

When developing client side javascript applications, the developer network panel is invaluable for debugging network issues:

How does a developer creating a NodeJS application monitor the network traffic from the nodejs application to a http/https server? For example how to debug the following network traffic?

var http = require('http');
var req = http.request ...
req.write ...
req.send()

My code is making a call to a third party https server, so I am unable to use wireshark or similar packet sniffing tools.

For more information, the problem I am trying to investigate is here.

EDIT:

Here are similar questions asking how to do the same thing in other languages:

• PYTHON: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10588644/how-can-i-see-the-entire-http-request-thats-being-sent-by-my-python-application

• JAVA: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3246792/how-to-enable-logging-for-apache-commons-httpclient-on-android

Use external HTTP Debugging tool. Your options include:

• node-http-proxy as seen in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10985350/how-do-i-use-node-js-http-proxy-for-logging-http-traffic-in-a-computer
• middlefiddle written in node.js (but abandoned for 3 years now) https://github.com/mdp/middlefiddle
• mitmproxy - a CLI tool http://mitmproxy.org
• fiddler http://www.telerik.com/fiddler
• and many more - https://www.google.pl/search?q=HTTP+debugger

You fire up one of those, tell them where to route the traffic, and point your application at that debugging proxy instead of the real server.

If you only need to see URLs of outgoing traffic and what caused it, You can use debugging-aid

npm i -D debugging-aid
node --require debugging-aid/network app.js 

Resulting console output may look like this:

[aid] network, outgoing  to: http://example.com/
 stack:     at Agent.createSocket (_http_agent.js:234:26)
    at Agent.addRequest (_http_agent.js:193:10)
    at new ClientRequest (_http_client.js:277:16)
    at Object.request (http.js:44:10)
    at Request.start (myapp-path/node_modules/request/request.js:751:32)
    at Request.end (myapp-path/node_modules/request/request.js:1511:10)
[aid] network, outgoing  to: http://example.com/
 stack:     at Agent.createSocket (_http_agent.js:234:26)
    at Agent.addRequest (_http_agent.js:193:10)
    at new ClientRequest (_http_client.js:277:16)
    at Object.request (http.js:44:10)
    at get (myapp-path/node_modules/got/source/request-as-event-emitter.js:234:22)
    at Immediate.<anonymous> (myapp-path/node_modules/got/source/request-as-event-emitter.js:305:10)

---

Disclaimer:

I'm the author of debugging-aid
This answer was written when debugging-aid was on version 0.2.1

I came to this question looking for something similar but I'm using the request package. In this case all you need to do is include this line in your code:

require('request-debug')(request);

(make sure request-debug package is installed)

This will print all the request data to the console.

I know it's not pretty, but you could always output the content of the response headers on the console inside your request call:

var req = https.request(options, function(res) {
    console.log("statusCode: ", res.statusCode);
    console.log("headers: ", res.headers);

    res.on('data', function(d) {
        process.stdout.write(d);
    });
});

Your original question, however, was not about problems with the server side but rather a problem with the node code itself so this wouldn't be of much use here.

Use HTTP Toolkit. Install in macOS by executing:

brew install --cask http-toolkit

It will provide instructions for how to intercept node, chrome and others.

If you are using a node version earlier than node 8, I'm a big fan of node-inspector:

https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector

I believe it has everything you are looking for:

I also wished for a network tab in devtools for NodeJS Debugging. As it's absent, I used the below package. This tracks all http and https requests from the NodeJs application and shows them in a chrome network tab like UI.

Network Activity Viewer