Debugging WebSocket in Google Chrome

Question

Is there a way  or an extension  that lets me watch the  traffic  going through a WebSocket  For debugging purposes I d like to see the client and server requests responses

User · Answer

Chrome developer tools allows to see handshake request which stays pending during the opened connection  but you can t see traffic as far as I know  However you can sniff it for example

User · Answer

As for a tool I started using  I suggest firecamp Its like Postman  but it also supports websockets and socket io

User · Answer

I have used Chrome extension called Simple WebSocket Client v0 1 3 that is published by user hakobera   It is very simple in its usage where it allows opening websockets on a given URL  send messages and close the socket connection   It is very minimalistic

User · Answer

Chrome Canary and Chromium now have WebSocket message frame inspection feature  Here are the steps to test it quickly    Navigate to the WebSocket Echo demo  hosted on the websocket org site  Turn on the Chrome Developer Tools  Click Network  and to filter the traffic shown by the Dev Tools  click WebSockets  In the Echo demo  click Connect  On the Headers tab in Google Dev Tool you can inspect the WebSocket handshake  Click the Send button in the Echo demo  THIS STEP IS IMPORTANT  To see the WebSocket frames in the Chrome Developer Tools  under Name Path  click the echo websocket org entry  representing your WebSocket connection  This refreshes the main panel on the right and makes the WebSocket Frames tab show up with the actual WebSocket message content    Note  Every time you send or receive new messages  you have to refresh the main panel by clicking on the echo websocket org entry on the left   I also posted the steps with screen shots and video   My recently published book  The Definitive Guide to HTML5 WebSocket  also has a dedicated appendix covering the various inspection tools  including Chrome Dev Tools  Chrome net-internals  and Wire Shark

User · Answer

The other answers cover the most common scenario  watch the content of the frames  Developer Tools -  Network tab -  Right click on the websocket connection -  frames    If you want to know some more informations  like which sockets are currently open idle or be able to close them you ll find this url useful  chrome   net-internals  sockets

User · Answer

Short answer for Chrome Version 29 and up    Open debugger  go to the tab  Network  Load page with websocket Click on the websocket request with upgrade response from server Select the tab  Frames  to see websocket frames Click on the websocket request again to refresh frames

User · Answer

They seem to continuously change stuff in Chrome  but here s what works right now  -   First you must click on the red record button or you ll get nothing   I never noticed the WS before but it filters out the web socket connections   Select it and then you can see the Frames  now called Messages  which will show you error messages etc

User · Answer

Chrome developer tools now have the ability to list WebSocket frames and also inspect the data if the frames are not binary   Process    Launch Chrome Developer tools Load your page and initiate the WebSocket connections Click the Network Tab  Select the WebSocket connection from the list on the left  it will have status of  101 Switching Protocols   Click the Messages sub-tab  Binary frames will show up with a length and time-stamp and indicate whether they are masked  Text frames will show also include the payload content    If your WebSocket connection uses binary frames then you will probably still want to use Wireshark to debug the connection  Wireshark 1 8 0 added dissector and filtering support for WebSockets  An alternative may be found in this other answer

User · Answer

You have 3 options  Chrome  via Developer Tools -  Network tab   Wireshark  and Fiddler  via Log tab   however they all very basic   If you have very high volume of traffic or each frame is very large  it becomes very difficult to use them for debugging   You can however use Fiddler with FiddlerScript to inspect WebSocket traffic in the same way you inpect HTTP traffic  Few advantages of this solution are that you can leverage many other functionalities in Fiddler  such as multiple inspectors  HexView  JSON  SyntaxView   compare packets  and find packets  etc    Please refer to my recently written article on CodeProject  which show you how to Debug Inspect WebSocket traffic with Fiddler  with FiddlerScript   http   www codeproject com Articles 718660 Debug-Inspect-WebSocket-traffic-with-Fiddler

User · Answer

I m just posting this since Chrome changes alot  and none of the answers were quite up to date    Open dev tools REFRESH YOUR PAGE  so that the WS connection is captured by the network tab  Click your request Click the  Frames  sub-tab  You should see somthing like this

User · Answer

If you don t have a page which is accessing the websocket  you can open up the Chrome console and type your JavaScript in   var webSocket   new WebSocket  ws   address port    webSocket onmessage   function data    console log data       This will open up the web socket so you can see it in the network tab and in the console

[google-chrome] Debugging WebSocket in Google Chrome

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