Viewing reports

Text reports

By default, HTTPolice produces simple plain text reports like this:

------------ request: PUT /articles/109226/
E 1000 Malformed If-Match header
C 1093 User-Agent contains no actual product
------------ response: 204 No Content
C 1110 204 response with no Date header
E 1221 Strict-Transport-Security without TLS
------------ request: POST /articles/109226/comments/
...

They are intended to be suitable for grep and other Unix-like tools.

HTML reports

Use the -o html option to enable much more detailed HTML reports. These include explanations for every notice, cross-referenced with the standards, as well as previews of the actual requests and responses.

Please note that these previews do not represent exactly what was sent on the wire. For example, in an HTTP/1.x request, a header may have been split into two physical lines, but will be rendered as one line in the report.

Options

In the top right hand corner of an HTML report, there’s an options menu.

The first three options allow you to filter the report on the fly. This is independent from silencing: you cannot undo silencing with these options.

Hide boring exchanges

Check this to hide all exchanges where no problems were found (only debug notices or none at all).

Boring notices

Additional notice IDs or severities that should not be considered problems. For example: 1089 1135 C (C for “comment”).

Hide boring notices

Check this if you don’t want to see those boring notices at all. They will be hidden even from exchanges that have other problems.

Other options:

Show remarks

Check this to show remarks before requests and responses, if any. The nature of these remarks depends on where the data comes from. If you use the httpolice command-line tool, remarks will contain the names of the input files and (for streams input only) the byte offsets within those files. This can help with debugging.

HTML in text

What if you want full details like in HTML reports, but on a textual display? Perhaps you’re running HTTPolice on a remote machine via ssh.

You can simply use a text-mode Web browser like w3m:

$ httpolice -o html ... | w3m -M -T text/html

Exit status

When using the httpolice command-line tool, there’s another channel of information besides the report itself: the command’s exit status. If you pass the --fail-on option, the exit status will be non-zero if any notices with the given severity (or higher) have been reported. For example:

$ httpolice -i combined --fail-on comment test/combined_data/1125_1
------------ request: GET /
------------ response: 304 Not Modified
E 1125 Probably wrong use of status code 304

$ echo $?
1

This can be used to take automated action (like failing tests) without parsing the report itself.