I’ve been a long-time fan of RequestBin, but it’s no longer active since it suffered so much bad traffic. It’s never been too difficult to set up locally and when I tried to do that last week, I realised it has got even easier because it now has a docker-compose configuration.

Requestbin, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a tool that will create “request bins”, unique URLs that you can send HTTP traffic to. It also provides a web interface where you can go and inspect the requests that were sent, so it’s an excellent tool for testing HTTP clients, buggy API requests … all sorts of things. It’s been offered as a hosted service in the past which I guess is a convenient and quick way to get started with something, but it’s almost as quick to set it up locally.

First: clone the repository https://github.com/Runscope/requestbin

Then, you’ll need Docker Compose to run the next commands:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up

When those commands complete, you will find a RequestBin running at http://localhost:8080 – Happy HTTP request testing :)