Show HN: Trayce – Burp Suite for developers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Trayce – Burp Suite for developers

trayce.dev

84 pointsev_dev314 comments

About a year ago I introduced Trayce to HN as the "network tab for docker containers". Now I have released a new version which adds an HTTP client. The idea is to combine network monitoring with an HTTP client to help developers interact with and debug web application servers.

Think "Burp Suite for developers".

Trayce stores requests as local files using the .bru file format. The UI is based on Flutter which means it offers a super-fast and modern desktop GUI with a total download size of 13MB (on Linux). I am still adding features to it so would love feedback. Currently the new features in the pipeline are: OAuth2, GRPC, and scripting. It is open source and free to use but a perpetual license must be purchased for continued use. The license model is similar to that of Sublime Text.

Thank you!

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I'm a bit confused about the license: On the purchase page (https://get.trayce.dev/) you state that "a license must be purchased for continued use". But if I look into the GitHub repos (https://github.com/evanrolfe/trayce_agent and https://github.com/evanrolfe/trayce_gui), the license is GPL 3? So why do I need to purchase a license?

To avoid the arduous task of commenting out a single line of code and rebuilding?

https://github.com/evanrolfe/trayce_gui/blob/019ee5df0f2c488...

The intention is to sell this software in a similar way to Sublime Text. So a one-off fee for a perpetual license. The main difference from Sublime is that Trayce's source code is available. If GPL3 isn't compatible with such a model then I'll have to re-evaluate what license to use..

IANAL, but GPL3 is compatible with selling the software (see Linux distros). However, it forces you to open up the complete source code and it allows the users to fork and recompile it as they see fit (but they must also open up their changes if they distribute it).

P.S. Here is the original post of Trayce from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41102981.

Another really great dev tool related to network traffic and proxying is Toxiproxy https://github.com/Shopify/toxiproxy

Great for ensuring your app works well with poor connections especially when using things like WebSockets.

Caido founder here.

It is an interesting idea. The market is pretty crowded on the development side with the Requestly, HTTPToolkit, Charles Proxy, Fiddler and Postman like of this world.

Is the value proposition mainly the thight Docker integration?

Great question! What differentiates Trayce from other HTTP clients are:

- An ebpf-based network monitor which allows instant monitoring of HTTP(S), GRPC, MySQL, PostgreSQL. Most of those apps can only monitor HTTP using a proxy. Trayce does not use a proxy, it reads the traffic from the kernel layer.

- UI is based on Flutter, not Electron or any other browser-based framework.

- Local git-friendly HTTP request storage

Very cool that it doesn't need a proxy. That's like magic! Can't wait to try it out on something.

And still none of these do protobuf/grpc/http2 properly.

I had to MITM some grpc service a while ago to develop a replacement for it and it was basically impossible in the end. MITMProxy got the closest, but it couldn't decode the protobufs.

I'd pay for any tool which could do that; if it existed.

If you're willing to, would you get in touch over email? I'm curious to learn more about your use case. My email is in my HN profile.

Trayce lets you import your .proto file to properly parse grpc messages.

The url is "trayce.dev/?resubmit=hn"

So, you're also traycing the developers lurking here? news.yc sets the "referrer" header, afaict.

> not intended for production monitoring

Thats correct. The sub heading of the web page mentions monitoring for "local Docker containers". If you want production network monitoring then there are plenty of existing tools out there like Pixie or Kubeshark.

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