Request Sink

A small cli application for logging requests to see what they look like.

Caution

Do not use this in a production environment. There are no protections from malicious requests.

Usage

Usage: request-sink [-hV] [--debug] [-p=<port>] [-s=<statusCode>] [COMMAND]
A simple http server listening for requests and logging them.
      --debug         Enable debug output
  -h, --help          Show this help message and exit.
  -p, --port=<port>   The port to listen for requests on.
                        Default: 8080
  -s, --status-code=<statusCode>
                      The status code to return.
                        Default: 200
  -V, --version       Print version information and exit.
Commands:
  config  Configures default options for the request sink server

Just run the app and send a request to localhost:8080. Using simple curl and wget calls the following output is produced.

$» request-sink        
Responding with status code: 200 - OK
Listening for requests on port 8080 - HTTP Alternate (see port 80)
================ Request 0 Start ================
Protocol:    HTTP/1.1
Time:        2025-09-29T14:11:50.754777257Z
Method:      POST
URI:         /
Body-Length: 18
----------------- Headers Start -----------------
Accept:         */*
Host:           localhost:8080
User-agent:     curl/8.12.1
Content-type:   application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 18
------------------ Headers End ------------------
------------------ Body Start -------------------
fancy request body
------------------- Body End --------------------
================= Request 0 End =================

============= Request 1 Start =============
Protocol:    HTTP/1.1
Time:        2025-09-29T14:11:56.293713214Z
Method:      GET
URI:         /
Body-Length: 0
-------------- Headers Start --------------
Accept-encoding: identity
Accept:          */*
Connection:      Keep-Alive
Host:            localhost:8080
User-agent:      Wget/1.24.5
--------------- Headers End ---------------
----------- No body in request ------------
============== Request 1 End ==============

Installation

Linux

DEB Package (Debian, Ubuntu, ...)

PPA

This package is included in the Schlunzis PPA. Follow the instructions there to set up the ppa. Then run the following.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install request-sink

Manual Installation

Alternatively, if you have apt or dpkg installed, download the latest release from GitHub and run one of the following commands depending on what you want to use. apt is recommended.

sudo apt install request-sink_0.0.5_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i request-sink_0.0.5_amd64.deb

Post Installation

After installing the deb package, see Wiki for further configuration.

Other

If you cannot or do not want to install a deb package, you can modify the pom.xml file and build the package yourself. To do that, build the package using the build instructions below.

Windows

Follow the build instructions below and run the msi file in the target directory.

Build

To build the project, you need the following:

• Java 25 or newer in your PATH or JAVA_HOME
• on Linux, you need to have dpkg build-essential debhelper devscripts installed. JLink and JPackage will tell you if something is missing.
• on Windows, you need to have WiX Toolset installed (https://wixtoolset.org/)

Note

On Windows use WiX 3.14 to create the installer. Newer versions might not be supported by JPackage.

Then run the following command:

just build

On Linux:

This will create an image of the app in the target folder. You can place that anywhere and run request-sink in the bin folder. If you want the deb package, you can run the following command instead:

just deb

On Windows:

This will create an msi file in the target folder, which you can run to install request-sink.