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I have a daemon, call it whatverd, running on TCP port 11111. It is basically an http server, but it does not do any kind of logging or debugging. It only returns query results via JSON in the http(s) response, like a normal web server. How can I capture and write http(s) requests and responses to a local file? My options seem to be:

  1. Modify the source code, in a language I don't know at all.
  2. Run an http proxy of some sort.
  3. Run tcpdump and redirect the output to a file.

Is there an obvious 'right' way to do this? Thanks.

PS: It's running on Debian Jessie (8), I do have root, and I can modify the TCP port number that whateverd listens on.

Luke Sheppard
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  • What I'm leaning toward is to run a separate http server or proxy on the same system, to listen on port 80, and forward the http requests to `whateverd` on TCP 111111. The return path would also have to go through the proxy. I just can't tell if this is a job for apache, squid, or something like tinyproxy. – Luke Sheppard Jul 07 '18 at 05:49
  • I think this is the right approach---you probably want what's called a "reverse proxy" sitting in front of your `whateverd` here. Apache, Nginx, tinyproxy, and maybe squid should all be able to do this, although I think that tinyproxy and squid are slightly more designed to be forward proxies. – Lucy Maya Menon Jul 07 '18 at 18:59

1 Answers1

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I'd just utilize systemd for this, and make a unit-file for your daemon service, whatverd.

$ cat /etc/systemd/system/whatverd.service
[Unit]
Description=whatverd

[Service]
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c "<cmd to run whatverd>"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then to enable/start it:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable whatverd
$ sudo systemctl start whatverd
$ sudo systemctl status whatverd

Now with this setup you can utilize journald via the command journalctl.

References

slm
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