v0.2.4 technical preview

Web debugging proxy in the spirit of Fiddler and Charles Proxy, written in JavaScript with Electron Shell and node.

Tested on MacOSX El Captan, Windows 8.1/10 and Ubuntu 14. Expected to break often.

v0.2.5

• Migrated to Webpack and some cleanup. Turns out I'm so addicted to Webpack I can't avoid it even when I have CommonJS available.

v0.2.4

• Refactor to Redux, making future improvement easier to implement.
• Still very messy from all the previous transitions, and not currently using Redux best practice: you probably don't want to copy this code :)

v0.2.3

• Updated some dependencies to work with the latest version of Electron
• With this update, modern browsers shouldn't choke on the TLS version anymore.
• Regression: A lot of deprecation errors to deal with, and the development mode toolbar now shows up. Next release should clean things up.

v0.2.2

• Some rendering performance improvements
• No more OpenSSL dependency (using the fantastic forge)
  • That means Windows users can now launch PhoenixMatrix from powershell, cmd.exe, whatever. It "just works" on all 3 major platforms.
  • Since the certificates are now generated in javascript synchronously, there's few performance blips the first time. This will be addressed in the future.

v0.2.1

• Migrated from Angular to React

v0.2.0

• Moved from nw.js to Electron Shell
• Updated to the latest version of Babel
• Updated Babel transformer blacklist for features iojs supports natively to clean up the generated code
• Removed a bunch of hacks for cross platform support that are no longer necessary for Electron Shell.

This is a technical preview at best!!

The UI is far from finished, the code is a mess, there's a lot of bugs. Expect crashes, slowness, and generally an unfinished product feel. It 'works' when stars are aligned, and that's as much as you should expect.

Again, the code is a mess. Please don't look at it and email me that its bad. For now my priority was to get things working.

• Works with all major browsers
• Works on all operating systems that Electron Shell (formerly Atom Shell) supports. Sorry Windows XP!
• Supports both http and https
• Allows real time https decryption with no scary warning (not even from Chrome!)
• Handles gzipped responses (doesn't yet decode base64 encoded bodies though. That's coming)
• Dynamically creates its own certificates for https decryption. No need to fiddle with OpenSSL! No OpenSSL dependencies whatsoever.
• Secure! The certificate authority is created on the fly the first time you launch PhoenixMatrix. No one else will have the private key.
• Free and open source the MIT license. Feel free to hack it up.
• Built on open web technology. JavaScript, CSS, node.js (well, Electron Shell uses a fork of io.js. Close enough!).
• Uses the latest EcmaScript 6 features, including generators, for better asyncronous code

• Clone this repo
• Open a command prompt and navigate to the location where you cloned it.
• Run npm install. Electron Shell will be downloaded here, so expect a big download.
• Run gulp
• You should now see the GUI application. Setup the proxy in your browser of choice (or in your application), and you're good to go!
• From now on you can use npm start to run PhoenixMatrix without rebuilding everything.

Different browsers and operating systems use different methods of configuring proxies. For IE, Safari and Chrome in Windows and MacOSX, configure the proxy from the system settings/control panel. For FireFox, configure the proxy in the options -> advanced under network. The default port is 3002 but can be configured

Exclude SSl/HTTPS from using the proxy if you don't need it and/or don't want to go through the steps to configure a certificate for man-in-the-middle decryption.

For https support, after running PhoenixMatrix, look in the certificate folder where you cloned the repo. Import ca.crt in your browser (Firefox) or as a system certificate for most other browsers/operating systems. If prompted, the certificate only need to be used for websites. On Windows, the certificate needs to be configured in the Trusted Certificate Authorities (you can just double click the certificate to launch the wizard). You may need to restart PhoenixMatrix and/or your browser after doing this.

PhoenixMatrix uses a certificate authority to generate individual server certificates, so only the one certificate needs to be installed.

if your pages aren't loading: If after installing the certificate in your browser, pages aren't loading, close PhoenixMatrix andor your browser and restart it/them. Seems like the invalid certificate behavior of some browsers leave the proxy in a weird state

The available options can be found in phoenixmatrix.json, in JSON format (duh!).

• includeConnect: if you want to see http CONNECT requests, which will happen whenever you try to make an https request while using the proxy.
• proxyPort: used to configure which port the proxy listens to. Make sure to use a free port. Default to 3002.
• httpsProxyPort: used to configure on which port the https proxy listens to. This is only used internally and will not work if you point your browser to it directly.
• certificateExpiration: how many days should the generated certificates be valid for

PhoenixMatrix is built on top of Electron Shell, which in turn is built on top of Chromium and iojs. This means you can easily add features or hack it up the same way you would a web page built with React and node/iojs.

Like the Chrome browser, Electron Shell supports the devtools you know: with the window focused, just hit ctrl+shift+i (command+shift+i on mac)!

• On MacOSX, when using the trackpad, scrolling isn't as smooth as it should be.
• As of the technical preview, it is not possible to directly disable https support. If you don't want to setup the certificate, ensure your browser is not configured to use the proxy for HTTPS if you do not want it to stop you from browsing https sites during development.
• The proxy currently only checks individual server certificate expiration dates to regenerate them. If you get an error that the CA certificate isn't valid even though you imported it, just delete the content of the certificate folder, restart PhoenixMatrix and import ca.crt again
• Expect the code to change a LOT from now on. This was hacked up quickly to get things working. If you make a fork, don't expect to easily be able to merge from upstream for very long.
• Doesn't support old HTTP versions, web sockets, HTTP/2, old servers or uncommon network setups.

Inspiration taken from the following projects (I don't use the, but I learnt a lot from the source). Thanks! :

• node-http-proxy
• pem

Splitter was ported to React from bg-splitter. Thanks! My port isn't polished enough to warrant its own repo, but if anyone is interested, I can do so.

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Francois Ward

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.