Charles 4 | Hacker News Reader

Charles 4

blog.xk72.com

100 pointsaaronbrethorst26 comments

Charles is pretty fantastic, I used it a little bit for debugging an Android app's server communication. The only thing that turned me off is that Charles isn't open source.

An open source alternative is James[1], which is pretty cool. Full disclosure though, I am a contributor :)

1: https://github.com/james-proxy/james

Another, likely more lightweight alternative is mitmproxy [1]. It is a CLI application, handles https and even has some scripting support.

1: https://mitmproxy.org/

Why does it bother you that Charles isn't open source? The developers behind it want to get paid for their work, and they've put a lot of that in over the years. I've licensed it a few times myself, and consider it money well spent.

There's a large population that enjoy and participate in open source software. For me personally, I like that I can fix bugs that a business might ignore, or the ability to fork a dying open source project, rather than watching it die (e.g. Google reader).

Open source doesn't mean free. Lots of people pay for open source software licences. Games do this a lot to encourage modding communities[0].

I'd like to see desktop software release their code more often. Then we could see for ourselves what standard coding practices are instead of relying on the talking heads of the software world to sell us the latest and greatest software methodology.

[0]: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Open-source-software-is-not-...

Unless you click on the download button there is nothing that mentions this is an HTTP proxy application.

https://www.charlesproxy.com/

Yeah it was confusing at first. I guess that was aimed mostly at people that used Charles 1-3 so far.

I thought for a second that the Queen of England must have passed away. Then I remembered that her son would be Charles III, not IV, if he ever became a king.

I also thought he would change his name if he became King since losing your name is better than losing your head.

Well I thought it was an xkcd on british royalty. Unfortunately this sort of titles are quite popular here nowadays, wish the mods would intervene.

The article is not written for those of us who don't know what Charles is, so it is being taken out of context when linked to from HN. The link title could have been been improved with a couple of words of context - but we followed the link anyway...

I honestly thought this was satire given the way it was written and the URL.

Yeah, I wasn't complaining. Was interested enough to poke around to find out more. Just offered the link for others who were curious too.

For what it's worth I think the project would benefit by giving a more prominent info link for the uninitiated in such postings. No reason to waste an opportunity to bring new people to the party.

The icon is not particularly evocative of "HTTP proxy" either.

I was looking for an HTTP proxy and I recently found Stoplight [1]. I used to use MITM proxy & Fiddler before.

I definitely like Stoplight a lot more (especially their self-documenting feature for 3rd party APIs [2])

[1] - https://stoplight.io/

[2] - https://vimeo.com/155438645

It's unfortunate that Fiddler Mono build is pretty old: http://fiddler.wikidot.com/mono

Sort of a shame. Is it unstable or meaningfully out of feature parity with other fiddler branches? I used to use fiddler a lot, but have been using mitm and charles since moving to linux/pc development in the last few years.

I've used Charles for the last year but Charles 4 is consistently crashing for me, and local rewrites often fail (it says file doesn't exist?).

YMMV upgrading - I wish I had not.

How does Charles handle gzip,deflate?

I use a short shell script for MITM.

It simply runs two socats and netsed in between them.

I create ca.pem and server2.pem with openssl, install ca.pem on my device and sign server2.pem with ca.pem.

I redirect traffic from device to my computer running the script.

Low complexity, works reliably, costs me nothing.

Downside is it only does one remote site at a time.

sslsplit works well too but it does not handle gzip,deflate.

I think the free version of Burp Suite will handle all of this for you.

Charles has supported gzip, compress, and deflate Content-Encodings since 1.8.1 [1].

[1] https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/version-history/o...

Congratulations on the new release. I have been waiting a long while for this. :)

Love the improved GUI.

Charles is nice, but I go with Burp [1]. It requires more work, but the extra goodies are worth it.

[1] - https://portswigger.net

The new Mac OS UI looks great! Thanks for your hard work!

So, the title doesn't tell me what it is, I click on the link and it doesn't tell me what it is, its a lot of work to know what it is in a universe of applications.

That's because it's a blog article, the homepage does exactly what you want https://www.charlesproxy.com/

FWIW, Charles is sort of a legendary app in the web development community, it's something that can definitely be discussed without an introduction on HN.

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