HTTP Toolbox

As Web Developers, we need to know how to work with HTTP from every angle. I gave a 2-hour tutorial at PHP UK that included some of my most trusted tools – but it was sold out and a bunch of people asked me if there was video (there wasn’t, tutorials make little sense when videoed). Instead, I thought I’d try to set out a self-study version of the workshop (I rarely teach these days so I’m unlikely to deliver it anywhere else).

There’s a slide deck, some exercises and a sample repo on GitHub … let’s dive in! Continue reading

Wireshark Capture on Remote Server

The joind.in project uses a really nice vagrant setup for its dev platform – which is much needed these days as we move away from a single LAMP stack install to a website plus another website, which talks to an API and caches in redis and deploys with …. you get the picture :) This is great but having everything on the VM can make it a bit trickier to debug what’s going on – and with a website that talks to an API that talks to MySQL, that all lives on a VM with port forwards, you can see the problem :)

To get an insight into the traffic going around the place, I’ve been using Wireshark and it’s ability to capture remotely, it’s really simple so I thought I’d write down my “recipe” on how to do this in case it’s useful. Continue reading