Pathod is a pathological HTTP/S daemon, useful for testing and torturing client +software. At Pathod's core is a small, terse language for crafting HTTP +responses. The simplest way to use Pathod is to fire up the daemon, and specify +the respnse behaviour you want using this language in the request URL. Here's a +minimal example:
+ +http://localhost:9999/p/200
+Everything below the magic "/p/" path component is a response specifier - in +this case just a vanilla 200 OK response. See the docs below to get (much) +fancier. You can also add anchors to the Pathod server that serve a fixed +response whenever a matching URL is requested:
+ +pathod --anchor "/foo=200"
+Here, the part before the "=" is a regex specifying the anchor path, and the +part after is a response specifier.
+ +Pathod also has a nifty built-in web interface, which exposes activity logs, +online help and various other goodies. Try it by visiting the server root:
+ +http://localhost:9999
+The general form of a response is as follows:
+ +code[MESSAGE]:[colon-separated list of features]
+Here's the simplest possible response specification, returning just an HTTP 200 +OK message with no headers and no content:
+ +200
+We can embellish this a bit by specifying an optional custom HTTP response +message (if we don't, Pathod automatically creates an appropriate one). By +default for a 200 response code the message is "OK", but we can change it like +this:
+ +200"YAY"
+The quoted string here is an example of a Value Specifier, a syntax that is +used throughout the Pathod response specification language. In this case, the +quotes mean we're specifying a literal string, but there are many other fun +things we can do. For example, we can tell Pathod to generate 100k of random +ASCII letters instead:
+ +200@100k,ascii_letters
+Full documentation on the value specification syntax can be found in the next +section.
+ +Following the response code specifier is a colon-separateed list of features. +For instance, this specifies a response with a body consisting of 1 megabyte of +random data:
+ +200:b@1m
+And this is the same response with an ETag header added:
+ +200:b@1m:h"Etag"="foo"
+Both the header name and the header value are full value specifiers. Here's the +same response again, but with a 1k randomly generated header name:
+ +200:b@1m:h@1k,ascii_letters="foo"
+A few specific headers have shortcuts, because they're used so often. The +shorcut for the content-type header is "c":
+ +200:b@1m:c"text/json"
+That's it for the basic response definition. Now we can start mucking with the +responses to break clients. One common hard-to-test circumstance is hangs or +slow responses. Pathod has a pause operator that you can use to define +precisely when and how long the server should hang. Here, for instance, we hang +for 120 seconds after sending 50 bytes (counted from the first byte of the HTTP +response):
+ +200:b@1m:p120,50
+If that's not long enough, we can tell Pathod to hang forever:
+ +200:b@1m:p120,f
+Or to send all data, and then hang without disconnecting:
+ +200:b@1m:p120,a
+We can also ask Pathod to hang randomly:
+ +200:b@1m:pr,a
+There is a similar mechanism for dropping connections mid-response. So, we can +tell Pathod to disconnect after sending 50 bytes:
+ +200:b@1m:d50
+Or randomly:
+ +200:b@1m:dr
+All of these features can be combined. Here's a response that pauses twice, +once at 10 bytes and once at 20, then disconnects at 5000:
+ +200:b@1m:p10,10:p20,10:d5000
+Set a header. Both KEY and VALUE are full Value Specifiers.
+ +Set the body. VALUE is a Value Specifier. When the body is set, Pathod will +automatically set the appropriate Content-Length header.
+ +A shortcut for setting the Content-Type header. Equivalent to:
+ +h"Content-Type"=VALUE
+A shortcut for setting the Location header. Equivalent to:
+ +h"Content-Type"=VALUE
+Disconnect after OFFSET bytes. The offset can also be "r", in which case Pathod +will disconnect at a random point in the response.
+ +Pause for SECONDS seconds after OFFSET bytes. SECONDS can also be "f" to pause +forever. OFFSET can also be "r" to generate a random offset, or "a" for an +offset just after all data has been sent.
+ +There are three different flavours of value specification.
+ +Literal values are specified as a quoted strings:
+ +"foo"
+Either single or double quotes are accepted, and quotes can be escaped with +backslashes within the string:
+ +'fo\'o'
+You can load a value from a specified file path. To do so, you have to specify +a staticdir option to Pathod on the command-line, like so:
+ +pathod -d ~/myassets
+All paths are relative paths under this directory. File loads are indicated by +starting the value specifier with the left angle bracket:
+ +<my/path
+The path value can also be a quoted string, with the same syntax as literals:
+ +<"my/path"
+An @-symbol lead-in specifies that generated data should be used. There are two +components to a generator specification - a size, and a data type. By default +Pathod assumes a data type of "bytes".
+ +Here's a value specifier for generating 100 bytes:
+ +@100
+You can use standard suffixes to indicate larger values. Here, for instance, is +a specifier for generating 100 megabytes:
+ +@100m
+The supported suffixes are:
+ +b = 1024**0 (bytes)
+k = 1024**1 (kilobytes)
+m = 1024**2 (megabytes)
+g = 1024**3 (gigabytes)
+t = 1024**4 (terabytes)
+Data types are separated from the size specification by a comma. This +specification generates 100mb of ASCII:
+ +@100m,ascii
+Supported data types are:
+ +ascii_letters
+ascii_lowercase
+ascii_uppercase
+digits
+hexdigits
+letters
+lowercase
+octdigits
+printable
+punctuation
+uppercase
+whitespace
+ascii
+bytes
+