Chrome Devtools Replay Request for Improved Debugging

Replay Request in Chrome Devtools is a game-changer for developers. It allows you to replay a request and see how it behaves in real-time, making it easier to identify and fix issues.

This feature is especially useful for debugging network requests, which can be notoriously difficult to track down. By replaying a request, you can see the entire request lifecycle, from sending the request to receiving the response.

Replay Request is available in the Network panel of Chrome Devtools, where you can select a request and click the "Replay" button. This will send the request again and update the panel in real-time, allowing you to see the request's behavior without affecting the actual page.

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Replay requests in Chrome can be a game-changer for debugging and testing. You can modify browser requests and resend them quickly.

Debugging and testing is one of the main reasons you might want to replay requests in Chrome. This can include altering headers, query parameters, or body content to see how changes affect the response.

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You can also use replay requests for security testing. Penetration testers use manual modification of requests to test for vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), and access control issues.

API interaction is another use case for replay requests. When working with APIs, you might manually modify requests to test API endpoints for correct responses and error handling.

Educational purposes are also a great reason to replay requests in Chrome. Learning how web technologies work often involves manually altering requests to better understand HTTP protocols, client-server interactions, and web application behaviors.

Here's a step-by-step guide to replaying a request in Chrome:

This is how you would resend the exact same request. If you want to edit the request, you would just need to do that between steps 2 and 3!

In Chrome, you can right click on a request and select Replay XHR to replay it.

You can also copy the request as curl or fetch and paste it into the console or terminal to modify it. This is a more flexible way to replay requests.

To replay an XHR request in Chrome, you can right click on the request, choose "copy -> copy as cURL", then paste the curl request to your command line terminal.

You can inspect a resource's details in the developer tools by clicking on the Headers tab to view HTTP headers. This is useful for understanding how a request is constructed.

To view a basic HTML rendering, click the Preview tab. This is helpful when an API returns an error code in HTML and it's easier to read the rendered HTML than the HTML source code.

The Response tab shows the HTML source code, and you can re-format a minified file by clicking the Formatdata_object button at the bottom of the tab. This makes it easier to understand the code.

A request initiator chain can be viewed by clicking the Initiator tab. This shows a tree that maps the request initiator chain.

A breakdown of the network activity for a resource can be viewed by clicking the Timing tab. This helps you understand how long each part of the request took to complete.

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You can also right click on a request and select Replay XHR to re-run the request in Chrome. This is a convenient way to test a request again.

Here are some ways to replay a request in Chrome:

Note that you can also use Firefox's Live HTTP Headers addon to edit and resend requests.

Measuring user flow is a great way to understand how your website is performing.

You can measure the performance of a user flow by clicking on the Measure performance button. This button triggers a replay of the user flow, then opens the performance trace in the Performance panel.

Checkout is a critical user flow of a shopping website, and measuring it regularly can help identify areas for improvement. The Recorder panel allows you to record the checkout flow once and measure it regularly.

The Performance panel is where the magic happens, and it's where you can analyze your page's runtime performance. You can even enable the Web Vitals checkbox to view the Web Vitals metrics, which can help you identify opportunities to improve your user browsing experience.

By measuring user flow, you can get a better understanding of how your website is performing and where you can make improvements. This can help you provide a better experience for your users and improve your website's overall performance.