NetLogger — iOS Library to Debug Network Requests in-app
When writing mobile apps, app developers need to work closely with backend engineers to integrate web-services or APIs. If you are a mobile app developer, you would often ask your backend engineer for a sample request / response format for the APIs if there’s no API documentation yet.
While debugging network requests, app developers tend to use independent tools like Postman — which works great as it allows to test web-services before integrating them. Many a times, developers also tend to setup proxy connections to log network requests using a desktop app. In most of the cases, developers are interested to see the structure of the sent or received parameters and payload. When working on optimizing an app, request & response size and time come into the picture as well.
At VersionN Studios, we use a simple home grown library, NetLogger, to log network requests on iOS and view all the details within the app interface itself. We are happy to release the NetLogger library for public use today.
NetLogger is an iOS library to keep track of all the network requests made by your app. The library can be used to track all HTTP requests (GET, POST, PUT, UPDATE, HEAD, etc.) and see details of all the requests made. The details include info like request URL, request & response headers, request and response body, request and response time, round trip duration, etc. amongst other details.
The library can be used for debugging network calls, see the exact url and payload sent or received in the request right from with the app interface. Using the library enables a special debug user interface that can be launched within the app. All the details of the network requests can be viewed within this UI itself. There is no need for the device to be connected to XCode (not even wirelessly!) when debugging network requests.
Sounds interesting? Try it out by using the NetLogger cocoapod in your app. It works with both Objective-C and Swift projects.
More details and instructions on use are available here: https://cocoapods.org/pods/NetLogger
PS: Since this is an initial release, we’re shipping only parts of the library that we know would work out of the box~ We plan to maintain the library and update it with new features & more network debugging functionality. Would appreciate any feedback, feature requests and contributions — https://github.com/croozeus/NetLogger
