Intercepting JSON HTTP Responses to Web Browser Page Requests Using MITMProxy

Coming back from a week or so away, the car let us down with a ruptured water hose which sent my confidence / mental state tanking, albeit with the AA managing a  quick fix with some new-to-me water activated tape along the lines of this . (It’s bad enough requiring a call out, but the stress is multiplied when you live on an island!)

My reboot strategy was to have a quick play with data from the weekend’s WRC rally, but when my datagrabber failed, it tanked my mood further and resulted in an 18 hour not-moving / not eating manic coding stretch that I’m still bleary eyed from.

The problem stemmed from a couple of things that interacted enough to confuse me. One was a pandas update that changed the behaviour of the json_normalize function I was using to unpack JSON values, and the other was the behaviour of the WRC server I pull data from (probably in breach of terms and conditions) which erratically kept giving a NULL/404 response to valid requests.

I’m not sure if the server behaviour was a defensive measure against scraping on the part of the publisher or if it’s an issue with the cache service I’m pulling from (certainly, hitting the same URL could give a valid data response, then nothing for the next few hits, then a response again). I tweaked my Python requests scraper code by adding some header info to spoof a browser user-agent, as well as tweaking the request period to make it play a bit nicer, but still the erratic 404s appeared at any ever greater rate.

Loading pages via a browser works okay, with the JSON requests being handled correctly, so I could just scrape the HTML tables that I think the JSON is used to populate (else: why load it?), although I have noted in the past that the JSON data structures have more data fields than are displayed in the WRC live timing HTML tables.

Then I started wonder about how to automate the collection of those requests using a browser automation route, with Selenium handling page selections and something grabbing the data perhaps from the browser devtools har archive (right click on a recorded entry in the devtools network listing to save all of them to a har archive).

The har archive itself is a JSON file, so that’s quite easy to work with, but the Chrome export (I think) is everything, not just filtered requests as in the screenshot above. Firefox seems to let you filter network items and just export filtered ones to a har file, which you can then open as a json file, filtering on the url to identify the request(s) of interest.

In passing, I also note that the har-extractor tool makes previewing life easier in the way it unpacks requests from a har archive into discrete files in a (nested) directory structure.

I also notice just now that the Firefox developer tools also seem to have a websocket sniffer, which could be handy… [UPDATE: I think that may be an extension I installed…]  FWIW, I also started trying to get my head around web sockets in a generic Python context when I was trying to come up with a simple MyBinder client (see here): A Minimal Python Client for MyBinder.

Whilst the Firefox route looked promising, I wasn’t sure how automatable it would be: whilst selenium-py would let me script lots of link clicking in the WRC site, I’m not sure it provides an API to browser dev tools?

I did find one tool I thought looked interesting, selenium-wire, but it seems to only capture headers, not payloads, of requests made from the selenium scripted browser:

#!pip3 install selenium-wire
from seleniumwire import webdriver 

# Create a new instance of the Firefox driver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

# Go to a WRC live timing page
driver.get('https://www.wrc.com/en/wrc/livetiming/page/4175----.html')

# Access requests via the `requests` attribute
for request in driver.requests:
    if request.response:
        if 'sasCache' in request.path:
            print(
                request.path,
                request.response.status_code,
                request.response.headers,
                request.body,
                '\n'
            )

I can see how that might be handy for capturing the addresses of resources loaded by a page, but I want the actual gzipped JSON data that forms the request content for the resources I’m interested in…

UPDATE: seems like selenium-wire is totally up to the job:

Update: this also looks interesting, proxy.py.

Poking around further, it seems the best approach is to use a proxy that can grab traffic as required. There are lots of partial clues as to what to use out there, many of them referring to browsermob and the BrowserMob Proxy Python client, but no full recipes.

Another proxy that looked a bit easier to use, with a Python base and more powerful in the way you can script it, is mitmproxy (“man-in-the-middle proxy”).

Again, the docs and recipes seem to be a bit scattered, so here’s a complete recipe that worked for me…

Start off by installing the proxy and getting it running. You can do this on the command line with:

pip3 install mitmproxy

mitmdump -w test1
#This will dump intercepted requests into
#    the file: test1

#close with: ctrl-c

On my local install, but not MyBinder?, I can actually run this as a background job from a notebook code cell using cell block magic:

%%script bash --bg
mitmdump -w test1

To stop the background process, we could look up the process number from a code cell and then kill that process by process ID (kill PROCESSID):

#Process numbers 
! ps -e | grep 'mitmdump' | awk '{print $1 " " $4}']

or let the (Linux) machine do it…

#Or to kill eg
!kill $(ps -e | grep 'mitmdump' | awk '{print $1}' )

In a notebook, we can then launch a (optionally, headless) selenium controlled browser:

from selenium import webdriver

PROXY = "localhost:8080" # IP:PORT or HOST:PORT

chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument('--proxy-server=%s' % PROXY)
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless") 

chrome = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options)
chrome.get("https://www.wrc.com/en/wrc/livetiming/page/4175----.html")

chrome.close()

We can view the result using the mitmweb browser app (from the command line: mitmweb). (Note that I think this also runs the proxy…? Again, ctrl-c to kill it.)

We can load the file we collected within the web app and then filter the requests to ones of interest:

Selecting a request shows us the contents of the request response, which is to say: the JSON data I’m after…

So this is starting to look promising…

…even more so when we realise we can filter a collected set of resources using the mitmdump command, for example with a construction of the form:

mitmdump -nr test1 -w test4 "~u .*sasCacheApi.*"

which will filter the archived collection in test1 using any desired filters (eg. "~u .*sasCacheApi.*") to create the filtered set in test4.

We can also add filters when running mitmdump to collect requests, For example:

mitmdump -w test5 "~u .*sasCacheApi.*"

will only capture and dump intercepted requests from locations with the desired address pattern into the file test5.

I’ve now got a pattern that could be used to scrape lots of JSON files:

• set up the mitmproxy with appropriate filters to collect just the files I want,
• script selenium to load the desired web page and click through various bits of it to make sure all the resources I want are loaded *(not addressed here; I need to do a post on scraping with Selenium-py; for now, here’s an example of using it to [do some repetitive work](https://blog.ouseful.info/2019/01/21/bulk-notebook-uploads-to-nbgallery-using-selenium/)…)*,
• and then… then what? Parse the resource collection, that’s what…

Here’s an initial fragment for how to do that.

First, we can preview the headers for intercepted resources:

from mitmproxy import io
from mitmproxy.net.http.http1.assemble import assemble_request

def response(flow):
    print(assemble_request(flow.request).decode('utf-8'))

with open('test4', "rb") as logfile:
    freader = io.FlowReader(logfile)
    for f in freader.stream():
        response(f)

We can inspect what has been captured by getting the state of a flow object:

f.get_state()

This actually returns a python dict, the keys for which we can easily preview: f.get_state().keys()

Of particular interest is the response:

f.get_state()['response']

We note that the content is compressed / gzipped, so we can uncompress that…

import gzip
text = gzip.decompress(f.get_state()['response']['content'])
text

All that remains now is a tweak to the iteration through the response previewer (the response(flow) function defined above) to unzip and save each of them to a file. For example, something like:

import gzip
def response2(flow):
    fn = flow.get_state()['request']['path'].decode()
    fn = fn.split('=')[1].replace('%2F','_').replace('%3F','_').replace('%3D','_')
    print('Saving file: {}'.format(fn))
    with open('{}.json'.format(fn),'wb') as outfile:
        outfile.write( gzip.decompress(flow.get_state()['response']['content']) )

with open('test4', "rb") as logfile:
    freader = io.FlowReader(logfile)
    for f in freader.stream():
        response2(f)

I’m still not feeling right happy / in control, though… F****g Boris…

PS as to why scrape the data? For generating things like these Stage Charts for WRC Rally Sweden.