Pathod

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 in the request URL, like this:

http://localhost:9999/p/200

Everything below the magic "/p/" path component is a response specifier - in this case we're just specifying a vanilly 200 OK response, see the docs below to get fancier. You can also add anchors to the Pathod server that serve a fixed response whenever a path matching a specified URL is requested:

pathod --anchor /foo=200

Here, the part before the "=" is a regex specifying the anchor path, and the part after is again a response specifier.

Pathod has a nifty web interface built in, which exposes activity logs, online help and various other goodies. Try it by visiting the server root:

http://localhost:9999

Specifying Responses

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. By default for a 200 response code, this is just "OK", but we can change it like this:

200"YAY"

The quoted string above is an example of a value specifier, a syntax that is used pervasively in the Pathod response specification language. In this case, 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 below.

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

Pathod has a similar mechanism for simply dropping a connection 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, then hangs:

200:b@1m:p10,10:p20,10:d5000

Features

hVALUE=VALUE        Set header
bVALUE              Set body
cVALUE              Set Content-Type header
lVALUE              Set Location header

dOFF|r              Disconnect after OFF bytes, measured from the beginning of the response.
pNUM|f,OFF|r|a      Pause for NUM seconds after OFF bytes. 

Value Specifiers

@500k           - 500k of random data
@500k,utf8      - 500k of utf8. Other specifiers: utf8,alphanum,alpha,printable
"foo"           - literal
<path           - load from path under data directory
<"path"         - load from path under data directory

Anchors

Passed on command-line:
    -a "/foo/bar=200:!/foo"