{% extends "docframe.html" %} {% block body %}
<div class="page-header">
    <h1>
        pathod
        <small>A pathological web daemon.</small>
    </h1>
</div>

<p>
    Pathod is a pathological HTTP daemon designed to let you craft almost any conceivable
    HTTP response, including ones that creatively violate the standards. HTTP responses
    are specified using a
    <a href="/docs/language">small, terse language</a>, which pathod shares with its evil
    twin <a href="/docs/pathoc">pathoc</a>.
</p>

<section>
    <div class="page-header">
        <h1>Getting started</h1>
    </div>

    <p>To start playing with pathod, simply fire up the daemon:</p>

    <pre class="terminal">./pathod</pre>

    <p>
        By default, the service listens on port 9999 of localhost. Pathod's documentation is self-hosting,
        and the pathod daemon exposes an interface that lets you play with the specifciation
        language, preview what responses and requests would look like on the wire, and
        view internal logs. To access all of this, just fire up your browser, and point
        it to the following URL:
    </p>

    <pre class="example">http://localhost:9999</pre>

    <p>
        The default crafting anchor point is the path <b>/p/</b>. Anything after this
        URL prefix is treated as a response specifier. So, hitting the following URL will
        generate an HTTP 200 response with 100 bytes of random data:
    </p>

    <pre class="example">http://localhost:9999/p/200:b@100</pre>

    <p>
        See the <a href="/docs/language">language documentation</a> to get (much) fancier.
        The pathod daemon also takes a range of configuration options. To view those,
        use the command-line help:
    </p>

    <pre class="terminal">./pathod --help</pre>

</section>

<section>
    <div class="page-header">
        <h1>Acting as a proxy</h1>
    </div>

    <p>
        Pathod automatically responds to both straight HTTP and proxy requests. For proxy requests,
        the upstream host is ignored, and the path portion of the URL is used to match
        anchors. This lets you test software that supports a proxy configuration by spoofing
        responses from upstream servers.
    </p>

    <p>
        By default, we treat all proxy CONNECT requests as HTTPS traffic, serving the response
        using either pathod's built-in certificates, or the cert/key pair specified by
        the user. You can over-ride this behaviour if you're testing a client that makes
        a non-SSL CONNECT request using the -C command-line option.
    </p>
</section>


<section>
    <div class="page-header">
        <h1>Anchors</h1>
    </div>

    <p>
        Anchors provide an alternative to specifying the response in the URL. Instead, you attach
        a response to a pre-configured anchor point, specified with a regex. When a URL
        matching the regex is requested, the specified response is served.
    </p>

    <pre class="terminal">./pathod -a "/foo=200"</pre>

    <p>
        Here, "/foo" is the regex specifying the anchor path, and the part after the "=" is a
        response specifier.
    </p>
</section>


<section>
    <div class="page-header">
        <h1>File Access</h1>
    </div>

    <p>
        There are two operators in the <a href="/docs/language">language</a> that load
        contents from file - the <b>+</b> operator to load an entire request specification
        from file, and the <b>&gt;</b> value specifier. In pathod, both of these operators
        are restricted to a directory specified at startup, or disabled if no directory
        is specified:</p>
    <pre class="terminal">./pathod -d ~/staticdir"</pre>
</section>


<section>
    <div class="page-header">
        <h1>Internal Error Responses</h1>
    </div>

    <p>
        Pathod uses the non-standard 800 response code to indicate internal errors, to distinguish
        them from crafted responses. For example, a request to:
    </p>

    <pre class="example">http://localhost:9999/p/foo</pre>

    <p>
        ... will return an 800 response because "foo" is not a valid page specifier.
    </p>
</section>


<section>
    <div class="page-header">
        <h1>API</h1>
    </div>

    <p>
        pathod exposes a simple API, intended to make it possible to drive and inspect the daemon
        remotely for use in unit testing and the like.
    </p>

    <table class="table table-bordered">
        <tbody>
            <tr>
                <td>
                    /api/clear_log
                </td>
                <td>
                    A POST to this URL clears the log buffer.
                </td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>
                    /api/info
                </td>
                <td>
                    Basic version and configuration info.
                </td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>
                    /api/log
                </td>
                <td>
                    Returns the current log buffer. At the moment the buffer size is 500 entries - when the
                    log grows larger than this, older entries are discarded. The returned
                    data is a JSON dictionary, with the form:

                    <pre>{ 'log': [ ENTRIES ] } </pre>

                    You can preview the JSON data returned for a log entry through the built-in web interface.
                </td>
            </tr>
        </tbody>
    </table>
</section>
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