[ANN] Multiple simultaneous clients for a single remote web inspector server

[Thomas Aylott]

Multiplexing WebSocket Proxy allows you to use multiple remote web inspector clients with the same browser tab at the same time.

https://github.com/subtleGradient/node-ws-multi-proxy

# install the proxy server

npm install ws-multi-proxy

# launch the basic proxy server

node ./node_modules/ws-multi-proxy/index.js 9023 &

# launch a browser with remote webkit inspector server enabled

open -a "Google Chrome Canary" --args --remote-debugging-port=9222 --user-data-dir="$TMPDIR/.chrome-user-data" about:blank

# find available debugger sockets

curl -s "http://localhost:9222/json"|grep webSocketDebuggerUrl|cut -d'"' -f4

# inspector client 1

open -a "Google Chrome Canary" "http://trac.webkit.org/export/116497/trunk/Source/WebCore/inspector/front-end/inspector.html?ws=localhost:9023/proxy/ws://localhost:9222/devtools/page/4_1"

# inspector client 2

open -a "Google Chrome Canary" "http://trac.webkit.org/export/116497/trunk/Source/WebCore/inspector/front-end/inspector.html?ws=localhost:9023/proxy/ws://localhost:9222/devtools/page/4_1"

# inspector client 3

open -a "Google Chrome Canary" "http://trac.webkit.org/export/116497/trunk/Source/WebCore/inspector/front-end/inspector.html?ws=localhost:9023/proxy/ws://localhost:9222/devtools/page/4_1"

etc…

The Elements panel only really seems to work completely with one client at a time. Everything else seems to work just fine.

I plan to create multiple tools that use the web inspector socket API.

This proxy thing will make it possible to use multiple tools at once.

Enjoy.

[Paul Irish]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing this nice work. :)

[John J Barton]

I am curious as to why you would want a second client on the same tab?
Are you planning to proxy outside of the locahost?
jjb

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:10 AM, Thomas Aylott
<tho...@subtlegradient.com> wrote:

[Thomas Aylott]

I'm working on many small focused tools that will use the same web socket connection.

It was really annoying to be able to use only a single tool at a time.

There's no official plugin/extension mechanism for extending the devtools_frontend yet (afaict).

Some of the stuff I want to do doesn't really make sense to hack into the devtools_frontend code itself anyway.

That was the original reasoning anyway.

[John J Barton]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Thomas Aylott <tho...@subtlegradient.com> wrote:
> I'm working on many small focused tools that will use the same web socket
> connection.
> It was really annoying to be able to use only a single tool at a time.
>
> There's no official plugin/extension mechanism for extending the
> devtools_frontend yet (afaict).

I guess you mean: "the chrome.devtools extension mechanism:
https://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/devtools.html
does not support access to the debug protocol"? If yes, then I've
worked on that:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=125036

jjb