web/null
web/null is /dev/null for the Web. It silently agrees with and eats up any request
being VERBd to it, and keeps statistics of it.
web/null is great to use as a diagnostics end-socket of any distributed system you have, that works against another system sitting at an HTTP endpoint.
Replace any service with it, in order to have a real peek at what your other services are doing.
web/null is extremely useful (and being used) for getting stats data during stress testing a complex system.
Quick Start
via npm. It is preferrable (but not must) to run globally (sudo, -g)
$ sudo npm install webnull -g
$ webnull
== web/null v0.0.4. I eat your HTTP. ==
* Listening on port 4000.
* Flushing to webnull.log every 10 seconds.
Via Cloning
Alternatively, if you'd like to clone / run and tweak, clone this repository and run
$ npm install
You should then be able to run
$ node webnull
== web/null v0.0.4. I eat your HTTP. ==
* Listening on port 4000.
* Flushing to webnull.log every 10 seconds.
Output
And now just experiment. Here is apachebench
$ ab -n 10000 -c 10 "http://localhost:4000/"
Sample output, human-readable (debug)
...
127.0.0.1 - - [Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:35:36 GMT] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1"
127.0.0.1 - - [Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:35:36 GMT] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1"
1320845743 51 req(total) 0 bytes(total) 51 reqs 0 bytes 5.1 req(s) 0 bytes(avg)
Sample output, CSV (webnull.log)
...
1320845743,51,0,51,0,5.1,0
Doing more
Here's how help looks like:
$ node webnull --help
Usage: webnull [options]
Options:
-h, --help output usage information
-V, --version output the version number
-d, --debug Show when flush happens.
-c, --canned-response [file] Existing file name to read a response from.
-o, --output [file] File name to output to.
-i, --interval [seconds] Flush interval.
-p, --port [number] Port to listen on.
Contributing
Fork, implement, add tests, pull request, get my everlasting thanks and a respectable place here :).
Copyright
Copyright (c) 2011 Dotan Nahum @jondot. See MIT-LICENSE for further details.